While I was troubleshooting why Apache stopped serving php apps from my home directory, I ran into two more annoyances that required attention. I figured I’d share them as well in case you run into them yourself.

Here’s what I saw when I reloaded Apache:

jkendall@san-diego:/etc/apache2$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
  * Reloading web server config apache2
apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName
[Fri Apr 30 13:47:38 2010] [warn] NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts
                                                                                    [ OK ]

As you can see, Apache reloaded fine, but I don’t like seeing anything other than [ OK ] when I’m reloading my web server. Let’s tackle these one at a time.

Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name

Why is Apache all of a sudden complaining about what’s worked for so long? I’m not sure exactly, but thankfully the fix was simple and easy. Simply adding “ServerName localhost” to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf took care of the first complaint (Big thanks to Mohamed Aslam for his clear instructions on how to get this fixed.).

NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts

The problem boiled down to having NameVirtualHost defined in more than one place. In my case, NameVirtualHost was defined both in /ect/apache2/ports.conf and /etc/apache2/sites-available/default. Commenting out the NameVirtualHost *:80 line in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default did the trick (Thanks to the guys in this Server Fault thread, especially to Ivan, for providing the necessary clues to track this one down.).

After making the above changes, reloading Apache didn’t throw any more warnings. w00t!