Hello,

when I issue an '/etc/init.d/asterisk start' or 'service asterisk start' command, nothing happens, except for the single process 'astcanary /var/run/asterisk/alt.asterisk.canary.tweet.tweet.tweet 21756' briefly visible in the 'ps ax' output.
I checked /var/log/messages, syslog, daemon.log, asterisk/messages - there is nothing whatsoever.
I can run asterisk normally, and if I issue part of the command from the /etc/init.d/asterisk which goes like '/usr/sbin/asterisk -- -p -U asterisk' it starts. However, the full command 'start-stop-daemon --start --group asterisk --pidfile /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.pid --exec /usr/sbin/asterisk -- -p -U asterisk' produces the effect described above.

This command actually comes from running 'bash -x /etc/init.d/asterisk start'. Here are the last lines of the output:
Some meaningful background: a few days ago the main hdd started acting up, with SMART going on about how it will die in 24 hours etc. So I dd'd the whole disk (with several partitions) and restored it on another drive. /var and /home were on separate partitions (and quite constrained for space), so I recreated them with greater size and copied data over. Everything was done from the Clonezilla live usb.

Asterisk directory is owned by user asterisk from group asterisk (as it were before), same for /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.pid and /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl.
But as I mentioned before, running init script doesn't produce any error, which in case of bad permissions should (at least it did a while ago when I screwed up during initial configuration).

I tried running the aforementioned command from the initscript with redirection to the logfile like this:
Didn't give any clues, as the log stayed empty. Then I in a fit of blind faith did 'apt-get install asterisk', and that didn't help either.

The system is Debian Wheezy, uname -a goes like this: 'Linux akko 3.9-1-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.9.8-1 i686 GNU/Linux', asterisk version is 'Asterisk 11.8.0~dfsg-2'

If anyone could give a hint where to look and what to try, I'd be extremely grateful.

Have you fscked the file systems? And if so, assuming it is an ext* file system, did any files appear in the lost+found directories?

It might be worth trying removing asterisk before installing it, and if that doesn't work purging it before installing it.

Thanks for the reply, catkin.

fsck didn't find anything out of order, and lost+found were empty.

Purged asterisk, installed it again, copied old /etc/asterisk back, 'chown -R asterisk.asterisk /etc/asterisk', and it works.
I tried to run strace on the non-working startup script, but to my inexperienced eye it didn't produce any errors, so I still don't know what made it behave this way.

Anyway, thanks for your help. Marking the thread as 'solved'.