It's taken about a week to figure out a weird problem with apache2.

The server is a webhosting server run by a control panel, and apache 
gets restarted from time to time as users make changes to domain setups 
(beyond our control).

Whitebox 3.0
Kernel 2.4.21-15

But apache is installed from source, not from RPMs.

Almost once daily it refuses to restart.

When I try to restart it from the command prompt the restart goes into a 
loop; I finally found this (from another shell) will stop it:

# service httpd restart

The above stops both services so they stop calling each other, and the 
loop stops.  Then I looked through the output of the looping commands 
and found that http couldn't listen on port 443 because the kernel 
process pdflush was holding port 443.

The process appeared in the output of ps waux as [pdflush].  I thought 
that meant it was defunct.  True?

Anyway, I did a kill -9 on the pid, and it disappeared from my ps waux 
output.  Then apache2 restarted normally.

Any idea as to how I might stop this from occurring again?

I've never had this on any of our many servers running apache1, and this 
is the only apache2 server we run.

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman, Nobaloney Internet Services
P.O. Box 52200, Riverside, CA  92517
Our blists address used on lists is for list email only
voice:  +1 951 643-7540, or see: 
"http://www.nobaloney.net/contactus.html"