Complex Plesk & Apache problem - Apache will not start

[jonworth]

I've been trying for hours to solve a complex problem with Apache not wanting to start. I'm running SuSE Linux 9.3 64 Bit, on a 1&1 Root Server with Plesk 7.5.4.

When I reboot the server, the error log in:
/usr/local/psa/admin/logs/httpsd_error_log
reads as follows:

[Fri Aug 18 01:21:49 2006] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down
Processing config directory: /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.*.include
[Fri Aug 18 01:24:35 2006] [notice] Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e PHP/5.0.4 configured -- resuming normal operations
[Fri Aug 18 01:24:35 2006] [notice] Accept mutex: sysvsem (Default: sysvsem)
websrvmng: Service apache2 failed to status
mailmng: Service courier-imap failed to status
dnsmng: Service named failed to status
dnsmng: Service named failed to status
dnsmng: Service named failed to status
/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/spammng: Pidfile /var/run/spamd/spamd_light.pid does not contain valid PID.
websrvmng: Service apache2 failed to status
mailmng: Service courier-imap failed to status
dnsmng: Service named failed to status
dnsmng: Service named failed to status
dnsmng: Service named failed to status
/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/spammng: Pidfile /var/run/spamd/spamd_light.pid does not contain valid PID.

The Services Management screen in Plesk shows the same - Web Server (Apache), IMAP/POP3 Server (Courier-IMAP), DNS Server (BIND) and SpamAssassin are all not working, but SMTP Server (QMail) is OK.

In SSH, I get the following:

sXXXX:/usr/sbin # apache2ctl -k start
(20014)Error string not specified yet: Error retrieving pid file /var/run/httpd2.pid
sXXXX:/usr/sbin # apache2ctl -k stop
(20014)Error string not specified yet: Error retrieving pid file /var/run/httpd2.pid
sXXXX:/usr/sbin # apache2ctl -k restart
(20014)Error string not specified yet: Error retrieving pid file /var/run/httpd2.pid

and:

sXXXX:/usr/sbin # ps ax | grep -i httpd
 1329 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
 1350 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
 1352 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

... and then about 30 similar lines.

I've also tried all the solutions in this thread but can't get it to work.

Any ideas would be very, very gratefully accepted!

 

[wagnerch]

If I were to take a wild guess then it would be something along the lines of...

is your /var filesystem mounted? does /var/run exist? does anything under /var exist? if they don't, then perhaps you lost your /var filesystem and need to remount it.

Other than that, it is tough to say without poking around a bit more.

 

[jonworth]

Yes, /var exists - there is a list of files in there. The file /var/run/httpd2.pid exists, but it is presently an empty text file. Can you advise me what is should contain?

For some reason all the files in /var/run are empty text files... Files in directories such as /var/log etc. are OK though.

 

[wagnerch]

Normally the *.pid files in /var/run are 4~5 bytes and they contain pid's. If they are empty then you can try removing the pid file and see what happens.

You may want to take a peek in /var/log/messages, and see if there is anything being logged there.

 

[jonworth]

Conclusion...

Just to explain what happened in the end: the problems ran far deeper than expected, so we took the decision to rebuild the server from backups. This is proving to be a nightmare - even worse than the Apache issues here!

Learn the lesson: make sure you have backups, but also try to make sure there are no errors in them! :-(