OK, so today was the highlight of the week … We updated apache2 on Tuesday (yeah, that’s still 2.0.49, so if you have some exploits - try them 😛 ) and now out of the sudden we have major performance issues. We looked nearly the whole forenoon for a reason, why the frackin’ apache was using 236% of the CPU’s.

In the afternoon, when my co-worker decided to go home (that was ~1500), I decided to revert back to the old patch level. But that isn’t as easy as you think (at least on SLES). The only thing I wanted to do, was something like this:

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$ emerge '<apache2-2.0.49-r63' '<apache2-mod_php4-2.0.49-r63' '<apache2-mpm_prefork-2.0.49-r63'

Looks like SuSE (or Novell who bought SuSE sometime 3 or 4 years ago) doesn’t consider reverting to an older patch level. Which means I would have to remove apache2, apache2-prefork, apache2-mod_php4; fetch the basic RPMS from our FTP server (which sadly forbids directory listing, so I can’t exactly look for the original RPMS) and I tried to blindly to fetch them.

Foooked. Didn’t work .. now I cron’ed the POS to restart every half an hour, so at least we have some solution. Will see about reverting the the last patch tomorrow again, hopefully I’ll find the original RPMS.