Abnormal behavior of a web-server on Directadmin server

Did you renew or installed a SSL/TLS cert and an old one is still showing up? And you think it's a Let's Encrypt strange renew problem?

Added a domain but still see "Nginx is functioning normally" or "Apache is functioning normally"? No ideas what to do? You think, it's a DNS issue?

Make sure Apache and/or NGINX restarted fine

Here you can try to do the following. Kill all running processes of Apache and/or NGINX (from console) and start the service again:

• Login as root via SSH or open a shell console.
• Run the following commands:

killall -9 httpd
service httpd start

or

killall -9 httpd
/etc/init.d/httpd start

the same for nginx (if it's installed)

killall -9 nginx
service nginx start

or

killall -9 httpd
/etc/init.d/nginx start

and check the site in a browser.

Why is it so?

Here down below you can find two most common causes of the issue. If you're unsure what to do with the provided information feel free to contact us to get our professional Linux-administrator to fix it for you.

httpd... Still alive?

In certain cases Apache fails to restart properly. To fix it you might consider to update init script which is installed into /etc/init.d/httpd. The recent one can be found in /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild/.

System V vs Systemd

Another reason might be that you are running Directadmin built for CentOS 5, 6 on CentOS 7 powered machine, or for Debian 6, 7 on Debian 8 powered server. The latest versions of CentOS 7 and Debian 8 use systemd and earlier versions use System V init scripts to start/stop services. Anyway check the value of systemd= in Directadmin configs with the following command:

/usr/local/directadmin/directadmin c | grep ^systemd=

It should be systemd=1 for Debian 8 and CentOS 7 (in most cases).

Let's Encrypt strange renew problem?

No, not necessary. If Let's Encrypt did not drop any error, and/or the script

/usr/local/directadmin/scripts/letsencrypt.sh

ended with

DirectAdmin certificate has been setup.
Setting up cert for Exim...
Setting up cert for WWW server...
Setting up cert for FTP server...
The services will be restarted in about 1 minute via the dataskq.
Certificate for host.example.net has been created successfully!

Be sure, the script is fine! It's only a matter of restarting a web-server.