I was working on a server and for some reason lighttpd wouldn’t start for some odd reason. Running it via Debian/Ubuntu “invoke-rc.d lighttpd start” or “/etc/init.d/lighttpd start” wouldn’t reveal an error message or anything in the log.
I hop’d on irc.freenode.net and put some information about my problem in the channel #lighttpd channel.
11:15 < comm> Hi, lighttpd recently won’t start up and doesn’t give any error output in the logs or stdout, I have an strace log.
11:17 < comm> The following is the strace output http://pastebin.com/m74389d99
11:35 < hoffie> comm: you are probably running in the bug that there are some error messages in a bad stage (right after forking, but
before having the errorlog available), so you cannot see the message…
11:35 < hoffie> this is being worked on
11:36 < hoffie> strace -ff -ewrite lighttpd … should reveal it
11:48 < comm> hoffie: danke!
11:49 < comm> hoffie: and it did find my error, thank you!
Now I can go about fixing this blunder!