Re: Apache fails to start under RH7.1

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Jean-Christian" == Jean-Christian Imbeault <jean_christian@example.com> writes:

    Jean-Christian> I pasted [/etc/init.d/http] at the end of this
    Jean-Christian> email as it is a bit long.

Looks normal.  It mentions something called initlog.  That probably
gets any messages from httpd as it chokes, but I don't know where it
puts them.  Try man initlog, if that doesn't tell you, see if there's
a file /var/log/initlog.  Also look in /var/log/syslog and
/var/log/messages (although if Red Hat is anything like Debian, those
files have become pretty contentless).  Or you could just grep all the
files in /var/log for "http".

    >> Where are the latter three?  Also in /var/log?

    Jean-Christian> Yes.

OK.  They're probably Apache's.  This looks like a misconfiguration to
me, though.  Those names are too generic, they should have a separate
directory to hold them.

    >> No.  /etc/hosts is part of the DNS system.  /etc/hostname is
    >> something else.

    Jean-Christian> Hum . . . no file called hostname on my system
    Jean-Christian> then. Is that a Bad Thing[tm]?

Depends on whether something is trying to use it.  :-/

You could try reverting the hostname to the old one with something as
simple as

		       echo dev >/etc/hostname

(as root, of course).

    >> Yes.  If your host doesn't have a nameserver to ask, then it
    >> has to look in /etc/hosts for all DNS information.  Do you have
    >> a nameserver configured in /etc/resolv.conf?

    Jean-Christian> Yes I do. But my machine has private IP address so
    Jean-Christian> no resolution should take place, I hope.

Well, in many circumstances the resolution will be requested by some
app; the question is does it come from the local system (which is what
you want), the nameserver on the network (shouldn't be possible), or
does it fail (bad)?

    >> My guess is that you typed it into some random GUI
    >> configurator, possibly for the nameserver on the network.

    Jean-Christian> Makes sense. But where is it stored now? I
    Jean-Christian> definitely have to get that fixed.

Try "host devtwo" and "host 10.2.100.85" to see if the nameserver
knows anything about them.  It's not supposed to, but that's a simple
check to do.

If not, it's somewhere on your system.  I don't know where Red Hat
puts that stuff, but it's surely under /etc somewhere.

    Jean-Christian> Ok. If I understand your logic this means that all
    Jean-Christian> machine with IPs (even private ones) must put an
    Jean-Christian> entry in /etc/hosts?

Not exactly.  Machines with private IPs (in the sense that even the
local name server doesn't know them) need the entry.  But this will
mean that other machines on your network can't find it by name
(without similar entries in /etc/hosts), and often may be unwilling to
talk to it by IP if the reverse lookup (IP-to-name) comes up empty.

Machines with public IPs often can function with only the localhost
entry (and hosts with dynamically assigned addresses must do so).


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