[CentOS] General protection error

Mon Jun 4 06:37:13 UTC 2007
Haakon Gjersvik Eriksen <haakon at basefarm.no>

G'morning, all

Over the last few months I've had a few instances of log lines of the 
following type on a handful of servers:
nscd[9301] general protection rip:2a9578dea0 rsp:405f1368 error:0

As far as I've been able to figure out, this is the kernel warning me 
that nscd has tried to write outside of its allocated memory. Since the 
current nscd is started at the exact same time as the log message, I 
suspect that the kernel killed the process and it was automatically 
restarted by our automatic host management system.

This has happened to different processes than nscd, and the servers 
where I've seen it run CentOS 4.4 or 4.1, with kernel versions 
2.6.9-42.0.2.ELsmp, 2.6.9-42.0.10.ELsmp or 2.6.9-11.106.unsupportedsmp.

I've not been able to find much relevant regarding what can be done 
about this, but I suspect that the general answer is "this is a bug in 
the application". If someone knows of any condition where this is more 
likely to appear than others, or any other debugging hints, I'd be happy 
to know about it.

-- 
  Haakon Gjersvik Eriksen     --                  Basefarm AS