Databases exist to store data. That said, a database is infrequently useful entirely on it’s own. So, managing databases means that we’re often interacting with applications that access that data. Some of the common applications that we work with include Oracle E-Business Suite, Tomcat, Apache and ColdFusion.
We had an entertaining problem this last week with Apache logging on a Linux server that gave our SAs fits. The great Google search also failed to find a real solution, so I thought I could post ours here.
First, the problem. We were seeing all the traffic in the logs originating from the same IP address. We were sure that this was not actually the case.
The ultimate cause of the problem was that the version of apr (Apache Portable Runtime) 0.9.13-1 was installed. For some reason yum didn’t want to update it to 0.9.4-24.9. This version of apr was installed by a handrolled RPM with an older version of apr.
The solution was to force the upgrade of apr with ‘rpm -e –nodeps apr apr-util’ and ‘yum install apr apr-util’. Very strange behavior that ‘yum update apr’ wouldn’t do it.
Maybe it will help someone else. Happy Friday.