Good morning, I've had a strange problem with Apache twice in the past week, and I'm out of ideas as to what might be going on.
Here's the background: I run a website that uses a plain-vanilla Apache server to serve images, and uses mod_proxy to forward requests for everything else to a backend mod_perl server on a different port on the same ip address. The problem that I ran into is that after running on the same configuration for years, and without a reboot for a month or so, the plain-vanilla Apache server stopped serving requests. - I did not *intentionally* make any changes that I would expect to result in problems, either to file permissions or to the userid that Apache runs under. - My first try was to execute apachectl stop and then apachectl start. apachectl printed: "/usr/local/apache-light/bin/apachectl start: httpd started". However, it wasn't running (which I verified by trying to run apachectl status and then apachectl stop). - The first time this happened, I was running Apache 1.3.37. I downloaded the tarball for Apache 1.3.41 and installed that in place of 1.3.37. The second time this error occurred it occurred with 1.3.41. - No messages were written to the access_log or error_log. (I have since been told that I should interact directly with httpd, and that this would likely result in messages written to the log.) - /usr/local/apache-light/bin/apachectl configtest returned "Syntax OK" - apachectl points to the correct pidfile (at least it's the one specified in /usr/local/apache-light/conf/httpd.con), and it looks to me like root has perfectly reasonable rights to the pidfile. I was eventually able to restart the apache process the first time by deleting the pidfile. When I ran apachectl start without a pidfile, the apache process started up and ran without problems for 3 days. The second time this happened, it wasn't enough to delete the pid file. I again reinstalled apache, and went so far as to reboot the server. (fsck did not find any file system errors on reboot.) This time, I was only able to restart the sever after running the following: [r...@data2]# touch /usr/local/apache-light/logs/httpd.pid [r...@data2]# rm -f /usr/local/apache-light/logs/httpd.pid [r...@data2]# /usr/local/apache-light/bin/apachectl start This finally worked, and the server has been serving requests for 3 days now. Any ideas on what might be going on? I'd love to have some ideas before this happens again -- it's been a stressful 45 minutes each time while I scrambled to try to figure out how to restart it. Thanks! -Chris
