perl dumped core--- trying to find the cause.

[Tim Stephens]

Sometime yesterday, perl dumped core on my server. I've been trying to work out what actually went wrong. I have two things that I know are running in perl: 
1) ddclient, which keeps my ip address synced with dyndns.org and
2) spamassassin.

The only info that I can find is a mention in the kernel log:
Apr 29 08:51:55 yuri /kernel: pid 2683 (perl), uid 1002: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)

Now, the UID is mine, so I assume that this was spamassassin that went wrong since ddclient is running as root. Also in my ~/Mail directory is a perl.core file that I tried to open with gdb, but it borks because there is no symbol file and no stack (I guess because it was from a script?).

What more can I do to try and track down/prevent this happening again. Could there be any other processes that I have running in perl (i.e. is there a way to find out 'ps -ax | grep perl' only finds ddclient because that is running as a daemon, spamassassin is called by procmail, so isn't there all the time)

My server has rebooted itself a few times in the last six months (due to kernel panics), and I've been trying to find the cause. Could this be it?  I haven't updated in a while, so would going to 4-CURRENT be the best plan (I'm going to stick with FreeBSD-4 at the moment)?

 
Thanks,
Tim
-- 
tim+questions at tjstephens.com