Friday, June 07, 2013

Apache on Windows cant start because of SSLSessionCache error

Received a call that a new setup of Apache could not start up no matter how she tweak the configurations.

She is on MS Windows Server 64bit, Apache 2.2.24 64 bit, etc, etc..

Event log:

















Another event log that points the exact problem.

















As i administer a large set of servers that are of different flavours, first i did a comparison between the UNIX httpd.conf and this Windows one. Noticed that there is this chuck "(x86)" is in the windows configuration file.

Microsoft used this (x86) string to differentiate between 64bit and 32bit programs and Apache is unable to interpret it.

In the UNIX world, we can usually use escaping to workaround but i'm not sure if this can work in windows world as setting to 8.3 format using \~1 or \~2 does not work 100% of the time.

In the end, just advise her to point the path to another path that does not have any parenthesis. The Apache work like a charm.

Job done!