madbury at gmail
Jun 1, 2009, 3:50 AM
Post #1 of 3
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Strange Apache error (appears to be related to bad pidfile)
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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. (I think this scenario used to be documented here:
http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/install.html#Installation_Scenarios_for_mod_perl_and_Other_Components,
but it doesn't appear to be there anymore.)
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.
- 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
- /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 errors on reboot.) This time, I was only able to restart the sever
after running the following:
[root [at] data]# touch /usr/local/apache-light/logs/httpd.pid
[root [at] data]# rm -f /usr/local/apache-light/logs/httpd.pid
[root [at] data]# /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
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