httpd and dhcp won't play nice
 

Alright...I have a fresh install of RedHat 8.0. The machine it's on is utter garbage, such that if I go into X at all, it starts crashing worse than Windows 95, so I need to be able to do everything from the command line. That's OK, because the machine's a server.

Now, httpd will run fine as long as eth1 (the NIC that goes out to the internet) is not plugged in. Since the server is doing NAT for me, I pretty much need eth1 to be active.

As soon as I get a dhcp lease from my ISP, though, it changes my hostname, and httpd won't start. It says "http: could not determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName"

I went and edited /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and uncommented the ServerName line and set it to 192.168.0.1:80 (That's the IP address bound to eth0, the internal interface). Now when I try to do httpd -k restart, all it says is "httpd not running, trying to start"

It fails, because httpd isn't running afterwards, but it won't give me any error messages. I try httpd -k start, and I get no messages whatsoever.

I'm pretty sure it's the dhcp-set hostname that is frigging up apache, but I need to be able to do NAT and httpd at the same time.

I don't particularly care if clients out on the web can see what's on my web server, as long as Windows clients on my LAN can.

change the listen line on your httpd.conf files to reflect the ip address
Listen 192.168.0.1:80
safe and exit
edit the /etc/hosts file
and add this line
192.168.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
safe and exit

then type
service httpd stop
service httpd start

I hit the same problem on a different machine; Going through those steps eliminates error messages when I try /usr/sbin/httpd -k start, but it still doesn't work.

if I try /usr/sbin/httpd -k restart, I get "httpd not running, trying to start"

I'm sure there's got to be a log somewhere that tells me what happened, but I don't know where it is.