Topic: Can't stop apache

[Erik]

Hi all,

I have run into a problem where my users are unable to access their webmail. Their POP mail works fine. I figured that their was a problem with the web server so I tried to restart it, stop it, start it etc. I am unable to stop it. Every time I issue a command to stop the server the response is :

stopping httpd  [ FAILED ]

However, when I start the server the prompt dispays the usual start message:

starting httpd  [OK]

All I want to do is kill the webserver entirely and bring it back up again. I do not want to reboot the server because it has bee up for so many months.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Best,
Erik

[Chris Parker]

apache wont stop because it may not be running. Can you access any web pages?

Also check /var/log/messages to see if their are any abnormal messages which might relate to the problem

[Bill Talcott]

Yup. If it's not running, it will fail if you try to stop it. Just restart apache, and you should be fine whether or not it's currently running.

[Erik]

Restarting it does not work. It won't stop only start. Even so no pages are accesible.

[guestHH]

what's the response using 'service httpd status' ?

enter 'service httpd' for more options

Regards,
guestHH

[Erik]

I caved in and rebooted the server. Too many phone calls. The webserver is running fine now. But I am sure this problem will happen again in the near future. All the normal processes of of stopping, starting and re-starting the server would not work. When I check the server status now, everything is fine. Is there a command to kill the apache process?

[guestHH]

That still would be 'service httpd stop'

[Dan Brown]

What was happening is almost certainly that apache was dying immediately after starting.  The error log should have given some indication of why.

[Jon Blakely]

The correct way of stopping/starting httpd is

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd-e-smith [restart, stop, start, status]  for webserver

or

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd-admin [restart, stop, start, status]  for server-manager


Jon