Apache setup trouble
Last night I had a rather frustrating problem.
I was setting up the XAMPP package on a Windows 7 box and wanted to configure some virtual hosts. This is fairly easy – there is a dedicated configuration file for virtual hosts and in my case they needed to be virtual virtual hosts – so I added them to the local Windows hosts file and to the Apache configuration file and saved.
Restarting the server gave the error code “-1 server not started”. One really frustrating fact about XAMPP on Windows (7) is that the errors in the configuration which prevent the server from starting is not written to the error log. Instead (and this might be the preferred behavior of others) it is logged using the Windows logging mechanism which is stored/found gods-knows-where?!! What is up with that?!
After finding the (right) log which actually showed the error nicely – I found that it was my “Order” setting that caused the trouble. It turns out that it has three valid values “allow,deny”, “deny,allow” and… some other setting I don’t care about… I had happily typed “allow, deny” and this simple mistake prevented the whole server from running! A tiny whitespace. One tiny whitespace!!
When going over the configuration to spot errors I never even thought of this as being an option – I am now much wiser.
