So there I was, working on my website when suddenly Apache crashed.
1. I went to Sys Prefs and tried to restart Personal Web Sharing, but it froze at "starting up" for a senseless amount of time.
2. I attempted to launch it from the console; it gave no error messages either at launch time or in the error log, but wasn't running.
3. I checked the console log, which said that the application crashed, and gave the name of a log in which I could find more information. That log gave useless debugging information (useless to me, since I'm not a programmer).
4. I tried various solutions: using Pacifist to reinstall the original Apache, rebooting several times, repairing permissions, updating Tiger, reverting to original httpd.conf, and so on. Same problem.
5. I finally isolated the problem. My ~/Sites directory was causing Apache to crash. No, not something *in* the directory, but the Directory itself! So I moved all of the contents into a new directory called "Sites," moved the old one to another name, and restarted Personal Web Sharing. It worked!
So... what in the hell kind of folder attribute could cause an application to crash just by attempting to load it?
I did some Googling and Macosxhint'ing about this, and didn't turn anything up.
1. I went to Sys Prefs and tried to restart Personal Web Sharing, but it froze at "starting up" for a senseless amount of time.
2. I attempted to launch it from the console; it gave no error messages either at launch time or in the error log, but wasn't running.
3. I checked the console log, which said that the application crashed, and gave the name of a log in which I could find more information. That log gave useless debugging information (useless to me, since I'm not a programmer).
4. I tried various solutions: using Pacifist to reinstall the original Apache, rebooting several times, repairing permissions, updating Tiger, reverting to original httpd.conf, and so on. Same problem.
5. I finally isolated the problem. My ~/Sites directory was causing Apache to crash. No, not something *in* the directory, but the Directory itself! So I moved all of the contents into a new directory called "Sites," moved the old one to another name, and restarted Personal Web Sharing. It worked!
So... what in the hell kind of folder attribute could cause an application to crash just by attempting to load it?
I did some Googling and Macosxhint'ing about this, and didn't turn anything up.