Thanks again, your experience saved me the day.

for i in `ipcs -s | awk '/nobody/ {print $2}'`; do { ipcrm -s $i ; } done;

I'm fairly certain the above command is relatively safe, but be aware that 'nobody' is a pretty important user at times

you actually don't need a shell loop and a "big" awk. Just use something like this:

ipcs -s|grep wwwrun|cut -d\ -f2|xargs -r -n 1 ipcrm -s

For more information about semaphores please take a look into the man-pages proc(5) and semget(2).

Frank

For RHEL6, they are a bit higher:

[philj@phoenix ~]$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/{msgmni,sem}
7630
250 32000 32 128

To override the defaults, edit /etc/sysctl.conf and use sysctl -p per the original post.

Thanks again!

but I needed to change httpd to apache inorder for the for loop to work.

for i in `ipcs -s | awk '/apache/ {print $2}'`; do (ipcrm -s $i);

cheers!

I have to love people like you

Thnks again

I don't know what the heck is a semaphore is either, but I'll tell you this much -- you're idea did the trick.

This is all started as the result of modifying apache's and PHP's config (was installing PDO, PDO_MYSQL, and PDO_SQLITE), which of course botched everything.

I went back and removed PDO, et al by using pecl and that did the trick, because before that apache was generating a massive number of errors, and "php -v" gave me a "segmentation fault" so I completely backed off that idea.

There was only one thing I had to change, and I think it will answer Jenny's question above.

I'm working in a debian distro, so I had to modify this line:

for i in `ipcs -s | awk '/httpd/ {print $2}'`; do (ipcrm -s $i); done

To this instead:

for i in `ipcs -s | awk '/www-data/ {print $2}'`; do (ipcrm -s $i); done

After that I got this (direct from error.log):

[Thu Dec 31 05:28:09 2009] [notice] Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch16 configured -- resuming normal operations

Of course that was music to my ears (er...eyes), and then I checked using "ps aux | grep apache2" and got this:

www-data 28829 0.0 1.3 29200 8044 ? S 05:28 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 28830 0.0 0.7 28808 4756 ? S 05:28 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 28831 0.0 0.7 28808 4676 ? S 05:28 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 28832 0.0 0.7 28808 4676 ? S 05:28 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 28833 0.0 1.0 28904 6728 ? S 05:28 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 28837 0.0 0.6 28672 4220 ? S 05:28 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 28838 0.0 0.6 28672 4220 ? S 05:28 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 28839 0.0 0.6 28672 4220 ? S 05:28 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 28840 0.0 0.6 28672 4220 ? S 05:28 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 28841 0.0 0.6 28672 4220 ? S 05:28 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
root 28859 0.0 0.0 1644 508 pts/0 R+ 05:33 0:00 grep apache2

Naturally, I was a happy camper, and so was my client for that matter -- thanks dude! =0)

this was a lifesaver. thanks for putting it up!

E.