On Wed, Dec 27, 2006 at 06:00:14AM -0600, Sam Fourman Jr. wrote: > I missed this in the faq page > > 7. Hiawatha won't start on OpenBSD. There's even nothing in my logfiles. > Try using 'ulimit -n 512' and start Hiawatha. If you give Hiawatha > more than 512 filedescriptors, OpenBSD won't let it run. I'm working > on this problem with someone of the OpenBSD team. Hopefully I have a > solution soon.
Yeah, this is an incredibly stupid bug. I'm not too happy with hiawatha myself. - turns out hiawatha simply forgets to initialize a pointer in its config file parsing. Somehow, that was never properly tested (any malloc with proper debug support will let you poison fresh allocated memory so that no unitialized pointer will ever work). - hiawatha always starts up as daemon, no flag to debug it, you have to tweak the code to get it to start as gdb. - hiawatha does not even set up a segfault handler. Any bug that would dump core will just make hiawatha exit, with no trace in any log file, which is very bad for obvious reasons. that makes for 2 big issues and a small one. For one web server which is supposed to be written `securely', that's not a good track record... and I spent about half an hour looking at it, I'm shuddering about what a full scale audit would reveal...
