My web server was down for most of yesterday, for reasons out of my control.
I shelled in only to see one error message upon restarting the Apache web service: Segmentation fault. I checked the last few lines of Apache’s error_log only to see many more errors related to the same problem. It’s one of most dreaded messages one can receive on a Linux box, aside from the dreaded ‘kernel panic’.
A segmentation fault usually means one of two things in the Linux world: a software fault or a hardware fault. So, I set out to determine what the underlying cause was.