apache doesn't restart on Ubuntu 14.04 server reboot

Question

I have recently clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 server. Recently I noticed when I reboot my server Apache 2.4.7 won't start automatically - If I try to restart it I get " There are processes named 'apache2' running which do not match your pid file which are left untouched in the name of safety, Please review the situation by hand."

I found solutions on here on how to temporarily fix the issue by typing pidof apache2 which gives the process id of apache, and then instructs on how to kill the service "kill -9 process id number here " this works fine except whenever I restart my server I need to go through this process which is a bit annoying. I am hoping someone can shed some light on how to fix this issue so apache just starts on its own on reboot. Any help is welcomed

A little detail about server

Ubuntu 14.04 ( most updated version ) Apache 2.4.7 I have a ssl key setup through Startcom to secure apache - When I restart apache service it does require me to enter the passphrase I created _ I wonder if this could be the issue when reboot the server - I don't remember that being the case though.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I had this problem consistently and it was the .pid file for the process before the reboot still being there. These are RedHat examples, but the concept is the same. A "service tomcat stop" both stops the apache process and the deletes the accompanying .pid file. A reboot was not removing the .pid file. What I ended up doing at first was manually stop and restart tomcat after the server came back up. Later I modified the startup script to do an automatic shutdown first. It would give me an error if it tried to stop something already down, but the webserver started up afterwards just fine.