httpd and dovecot service start fails

Nigel Wade nmw at ion.le.ac.uk
Tue Feb 7 09:18:14 UTC 2006


Harold Hallikainen wrote:

> 
> Oops! I geess I hit send instead of save draft. Anyway, I just rebooted
> the system and watched the screen during the reboot. I saw a message go by
> about httpd that said something like "ServerRoot must be a directory."
> ServerRoot is "/etc/httpd" which IS a directory (and this works with the
> /sbin start and is working on another machine). Another error message on
> dovecot flew by. I'll deal with that a little later. Any ideas about the
> httpd error, which does not, as far as I can find, show up in any logs?
> 

If httpd claims that a directory is not a directory when it clearly is, it could 
be SELinux. Are you running in enforcing mode? Maybe the SELinux setup for 
Apache has got mangled, and httpd is unable to access /etc/httpd and therefore 
falsely assumes it's not a directory.

If you are running SELinux in enforcing mode try switching to permissive mode 
(setenforce permissive) temporarily while you start httpd. If that works you 
need to fix the SELinux access rights to the httpd config files. Your website 
files may also need fixing.


-- 
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
             University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail :    nmw at ion.le.ac.uk
Phone :     +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555




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