Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 80520
httpd refuses to start - logs a [crit] level message in the log file
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:49:19 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021003 Description of problem: Upon a system crash (due to power and UPS failure), Apache has been "quirky". Upon shutting down the httpd process (via # /etc/init.d/httpd stop) - SIGTERM was sent to the child processes since they would not exit cleanly. Now, when I attempt to start the web server I receive the following entry in error_log: [crit] (17)File exists: unable to create scoreboard (name-based shared memory failure) Upon this happening - the web server main process dies. I am about to restart the server to see if that clears up the problem. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. see description 2. 3. Actual Results: see description Expected Results: Apache should have started with no error messages in the log. It would also be nice if the error message attempted to explain what was going on ("file exists" does not specify which file exists) and how to work around the problem. Additional info: $ rpm -q httpd httpd-2.0.40-13
There are some known problems about httpd startup after power failure (e.g. bug 78019) though you shouldn't see that particular error message in the default configuration; are you using the "ScoreboardFile" directive in httpd.conf?
Yes - though this file is largely default (I haven't touched the scoreboardfile directive myself). ScoreBoardFile "/var/run/httpd.scoreboard"
You can just comment out the ScoreboardFile directive normally.
I get this if I stop httpd normally; 1. Reboot 2. Check apache is running 3. service httpd stop 4. Check apache has stopped 5. service httpd start apache "starts" but dies 6. service httpd status not running! Same message as reported in the error log. It't won't start again unless I change the scoreboard filename. Note: I never set the scoreboard file, if it wasn't set in the supplied config file then it must have been set by redhat-httpd-config which I tried
Can also relicate every time on my machine - sudo service httpd restart - always - leads to a bunch of SIGTERMS being sent to the running processes and then I get that damn scoreboard error.
I, of course, meant "replicate" and "darn". I am running RHL 8.0 with httpd-2.0.40-11.5 on an i686.
You should remove the ScoreboardFile directive from your httpd.conf.
This is not really a bug: if you configure a ScoreBoardFile directive then the server will not start up after an unclean shutdown. The solution is to not configure a ScoreBoardFile directive.