Eat My Business

[This article is aimed at web developers who have medium level knowledge of Apache server administration]

I was deeply involved in hacking away at various proxy directives and had added some lines to my Apache Configuration (by editing the vhost.conf file for one of my virtual accounts on a LAMP server that was running PLESK 8.2 as a VPS Hosting package from WebFusion).

I had added the following BAD lines in my config :

…
#never let this setting be anything other than off
#otherwise we could turn into an open relay!
ProxyRequests off

#only because the above line of code is OFF
#can we do this next directive safely
<Proxy http://www.example.com/*>
Order allow, deny
Allow from all
</Proxy>
…

[IMPORTANT  WARNING : the code sample above should not be copied and pasted into your own config file without fully  understanding the ProxyRequests directive]

After editing the vhost.conf file, changes don’t come into effect until you have restarted Apache. So, I did this within PLESK at: System > Server > Service Management > {and then clicking on the orange button next to Web Server (Apache)}

Once I had done this - I got the error:

Top > Virtuozzo
Service Unavailable Active Tasks
Service is not available now, probably your Plesk is misconfigured.
Contact Your provider for details.

Internal Plesk error occurred: Unable to make action: Unable to manage service by websrvmng: websrvmng: Service /etc/init.d/apache2 failed to start

Because I was messing about with Proxy Directives (and I was suffering from a kind of tunnel-vision-debug-thinking) - I was convinced that the config error was caused by an issue regarding proxies.

That was not the case - I eventually discovered that it was a syntax error in the configuration

These are the CORRECT lines that worked in my config :

…
#never let this setting be anything other than off
#otherwise we could turn into an open relay!
ProxyRequests off

#only because the above line of code is OFF
#can we do this next directive safely
<Proxy http://www.example.com/*>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Proxy>
…

See the glaring mistake?

Yes - thats right … the line:

Order allow,deny

should have NO SPACE between the comma and the ‘d’ of deny.
See mod_access > ORDER for more info (where it says “Keywords may only be separated by a comma; no whitespace  is allowed between them.”)

Other Indications of Server Misconfiguration (for your interest)

Whilst attempting to look at the website on that virtual account Firefox 3.07 showed the following error message:

Connection Interrupted
The document contains no data.
The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.
[Try Again]

whereas IE 7 showed this error message:

Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage
Most likely causes:
You are not connected to the Internet.
The website is encountering problems.
There might be a typing error in the address.
…

Also for your interest:

I was running  Apache/2.0.55 on Ubuntu

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 12:13 am and is filed under Apache, .htaccess files, practical webmaster tips, PLESK, linux, vhost.conf, LAMP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.