Re: [users@httpd] Apache 2.0.54 randomly fails to serve index.html for single domain on multi-host server

[Joshua Slive <jo...@slive.ca>]

On 1/5/06, Thomas Leavitt <th...@thomasleavitt.org> wrote:
> Boyle,
>
>  You mis-read the message. Just to be clear:
>
> NOTHING IS TOUCHED ON THE WEB SITE.
>
> THE SERVER HAS DIRECTORYINDEX PARAMETERS in place.
>
> INDEX.HTML IS SERVED FOR OTHER DOMAINS ON THE SAME SERVER.
>
> One week, the server displays index.html, as it has done for the last
> several years, as the default page. On a site that hasn't been touched
> in months.
>
> The next week, it doesn't - for one domain out of 100, in a shared
> hosting environment. The others continue to work as normal.
>
> The next week, the problem goes away for one domain, and appears on
> another.
>
> The only way to get a default page served, is to rename the index.html
> file to index.htm, or symlink the two.
>
> There are no .htaccess files involved.
>
> This is why I'm baffled... I've been running web servers since 1994, and
> apache for five or six years (not an Apache guru by any means, but I
> understand how most of this works). The problem is not reproducible, as
> far as I can tell - other than in the fact that the failure isn't
> intermittent for the domains experiencing the problem, but continuous
> (until it disappears).

I've seen mandrake distribute some pretty hacked-up versions of
apache, so one option is to grab a clean version from httpd.apache.org
and see if the problem still appears.

Does the problem persist through apache restarts?  If so, you can
restart the server in single-process mode (-X command line option)
under a debugger and find out exactly what it is doing.

Joshua.