Dreamhacks: An apology, and a question: What do you find difficult on a Dreamhack?

[sophie]

I have a bit of an apology to make.

I haven't been doing a lot lately, and I'm keenly aware of that. I could use this space to find a bunch of excuses about why this is the case, but I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to say that I apologise, and that I'm going to try to make things better. Starting now. (Actually, starting yesterday.)

Because I haven't been keeping in touch, I know I haven't been very responsive to questions and comments. I want to change this, too. As such, I want to do a redo of a previous post that I made a few years ago: What do you find difficult on a Dreamhack? I want to try to help people and fix any issues they might be having.

Also, if you have any questions or comments about the Dreamhack service in general, please do leave a comment, or send me a PM! A comment would be preferable, but I'll be glad to respond and/or help if needed regardless.

Comments

Error

[ninetydegrees]

I've just updated my DH for the first time in a long while and I got this message:

Restarting apache ...
[Fri Jul 10 17:41:25.428380 2015] [core:warn] [pid 8269] AH00111: Config variable ${DREAMHACK_DIR} is not defined
apache2: Syntax error on line 5 of /dreamhack/home/8174-ninetydegrees/apache/conf/httpd.conf: Syntax error on line 1 of /dreamhack/etc/apache/httpd.conf: ServerRoot must be a valid directory
Action '-f /dreamhack/home/8174-ninetydegrees/apache/conf/httpd.conf -k stop' failed.
The Apache error log may have more information.
[Fri Jul 10 17:41:30.501004 2015] [core:warn] [pid 8273] AH00111: Config variable ${DREAMHACK_DIR} is not defined
apache2: Syntax error on line 5 of /dreamhack/home/8174-ninetydegrees/apache/conf/httpd.conf: Syntax error on line 1 of /dreamhack/etc/apache/httpd.conf: ServerRoot must be a valid directory
Action '-f /dreamhack/home/8174-ninetydegrees/apache/conf/httpd.conf -k start' failed.
The Apache error log may have more information.
Apache started successfully!



What should have I done?

Re: Error

[sophie]

It looks like you have a custom restarting script. The problem is that in order for the new Apache changes to work I had to add this line to the bin/start-apache and bin/stop-apache files:

source $HOME/apache/conf/envvars

You're going to need to add that line to the top of your custom restarting scripts - bin/dwdb and bin/restart. They should work again afterwards and you should be able to restart Apache.

If I may make a suggestion, though - you may want to just the custom stopping and starting with calls to $HOME/bin/start-apache and $HOME/bin/stop-apache. It'll probably be easiest that way, since it doesn't look like you're doing anything in your scripts that those two don't do.

Re: Error

[ninetydegrees]

Thank you for the suggestion and for such a fast answer! It worked beautifully.

Re: Error

[sophie]

No probs! I'm glad it helped. :)