Apache nightmare...

One of my apache servers completely gave up today. The interesting thing is that it worked for about 2 days after a reinstall.

After some good help from my friends Dirk, Google and gdb, we found out that the combination of Apache 1.3, PHP, Perl, DBI libraries, MySQL and (believe it or not) the multibyte support in PHP didn’t play well together.

By turning off multibyte support in PHP (by removing mbstring.func_overload setting in httpd.conf and php.ini) everything works again. With the mbstring support turned on, perl crashed when trying to load the DBI library.

Fun with “independent” group of developers?