What Would Cause Apache To Restart And Not Compile PHP

Today I got the devastating and heart-stopping news that all administraters fear most: "I'm looking at your website, and something's terribly wrong!!!"

The person went on to say that each page was just "filled with code ro something." When I finally saw it myself I discovered that my raw PHP pages were being served to the end user with no compilation --all of my top secret code; a real nightmare.

I went to look at the error logs and found that for several restarts Apache had not been compiling PHP.

It usually looks like this:

Quote:

[Wed Apr 18 18:35:11 2007] [notice] bandwidth monitoring enabled (mapping file: /etc/virtualhosting/mappings/apache.domainmap)
[Wed Apr 18 18:35:11 2007] [notice] Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_fastcgi/2.2.10 mod_jk/1.2.0 mod_perl/1.24_01 PHP/4.2.2 FrontPage/5.0.2 mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6b configured -- resuming normal operations
[Wed Apr 18 18:35:11 2007] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec)
[Wed Apr 18 18:35:11 2007] [notice] Accept mutex: sysvsem (Default: sysvsem)
[Wed Apr 18 18:35:11 2007] [notice] FastCGI: process manager initialized (pid 16385)

But now it looked like this:

Quote:

[Sun Apr 22 04:02:18 2007] [notice] Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a configured -- resuming normal operations
[Sun Apr 22 04:02:18 2007] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec)
[Sun Apr 22 04:02:18 2007] [notice] Accept mutex: sysvsem (Default: sysvsem)
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8i9/nonexistentfile.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/adxmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/adserver/adxmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/phpAdsNew/adxmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/phpadsnew/adxmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/phpads/adxmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/Ads/adxmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/ads/adxmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/xmlrpc/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/blog/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/drupal/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/community/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/blogs/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/blogs/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/blog/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/blogtest/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/b2/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/b2evo/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/wordpress/xmlrpc.php
[Sun Apr 22 21:21:57 2007] [error] [client 209.85.60.98] File does not exist: /var/www/html/phpgroupware/xmlrpc.php
[Mon Apr 23 04:02:21 2007] [notice] SIGUSR1 received. Doing graceful restart

WTH?

I could be WAAAY off base, but my first reaction was that I'd been hacked -- someone had found a way to disable PHP so they could find sensitive information in raw PHP pages. That could be totally wrong.

At any rate, even if I never learn why Apache sometimes will compile without PHP (and some other modules) without me telling it to do so, I'd like to be prepared for an embarassment like like this.

Is there any way, say, in the .htaccess file (or anywhere, anyway), I can tell Apache not to serve **ANY** pages unless the PHP module is present?