I cant get Apache to start on my server after it failed when trying to restart. I'm not getting any error message's when I try to restart it, just fails ????

Anyone know of a possible cause ?

Cheers,

Jaaphost.

Look in the messages and error logs for any clues.

The amount of info you're providing isn't helpfull :(

Thats the problem. I have done that and found nothing that looks strange !!! But I will have another peek and see !

Did you install or change anything after the last time you succesfully restarted apache?

Other than what another user suggested, you should always keep your partition size in check. Make sure you have enough space for the logs to write or be created, as well as space for the pid file Apache uses. Type "df" and see how much room you have left, especially in the directory/partition that Apache is in (*and writes it's logs to), as well as /var. A full partition will result in a problem like you described.

Your httpd might have crashed for some reason. Try starting httpd with strace: 'strace -f httpd <options>', observe the last lines before it exited, you might get some clue there.

You can also login with SSH and try starting Apache from the shell by using apachectl start. This will normally echo the errors to the screen so you can figure out what is going on. Not sure what Distro or control panel you may or may not be using so I can't tell you exactly where apachectl will be located just do a whereis and you should be able to find it.

contacted the server supplier and got the following reply :

"Hi,

It's fixed. The reason is that the system ran out of sysv semaphores. We increased the limit and it fixed the problem.

Thanks."

What the hell are sysv semaphores ?

Thanks,

Jaaphost.

sysv semaphores is a kernel option in FreeBSD that allows support for System V messages.

Semaphores are used for interprocess synchronization of shared memory. In layman's terms, the processes use them to talk to eath other about what shared memory is in use, and in actually letting other processes know that they have something in shared memory that they want to share.

SysV semaphores are semaphores as implemented on SysV UNIX operating systems.

When running Progress databases, we've always had to tune a kernel by increasing the max semaphores, but I don't think I've ever run out on a Linux box. It may indicate problems with processes not releasing semaphores.