On Tue, 7 Feb 2006, Tim Jackson wrote:
> I believe it happens when there are exim child processes spawned from Apache,
> and you then kill Apache. This happens e.g. if you have perl or php scripts
> that call "/usr/bin/sendmail" or similar to send mail, and those child
> processes are still running when you kill the webserver.
>
> Not being a UNIX networking expert I don't really understand why those child
> processes end up being "bound" to the Apache ports (they're not really
> listening on them in any meaningful sense), but that's what seems to happen.
A forked process inherits its parent's file descriptors. Presumably the
code in appache is forking another process, and then running perl/php
without closing the listening file descriptors.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service
Get the Exim 4 book: http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book
