A couple of days ago, I was trying to update my older netbook, which is now the kids netbook, and I got a bunch of strange errors during the update. A little later that morning, I discovered that my internal web server had stopped working. It’s a pretty vanilla apache install from the debian/wheezy repo. The only mods I’d made were to allow for support of the public_html folder in user directories as well as setting it up for WordPress.
I’d performed an update over the weekend and my guess is that is when it got zooted. When I tried to restart the server I got the following error message:
/usr/sbin/apache2: 1: /usr/sbin/apache2: Syntax error: ")" unexpected
Action 'configtest' failed.
This meant next to nothing to me. I mean, it looks like an error in the compiled image, but that makes no sense. I had an even more cryptic error in the error.log file which I can’t reproduce because I deleted it in the process of getting it running again. But it read similar to the above with a bunch of what looked like Unicode characters after it- in other words, no text but a bunch of symbols. Very weird. Oh, and Google was no help. I seem to be the only one to have encountered this problem.
Ultimately, I was able to get it back by uninstalling and purging all the packages related to apache2. It’s possible it had something to do with the apache2.2-bin package, but I can’t really be sure. All I know is that until I removed everything webserver related, followed by reinstalling, I was unable to get it running again. Before I did that, I archived the configuration directories for apache, php and wordpress so all I’d have to do, hopefully, is replace the stock configuration with my archived settings. As it turned out, that worked.
Ultimately, not a very satisfying conclusion. But it’s running again, so I’ll take it.