How should I diagnose apache falling over during SSL load when there are no logs?

Question

I am attempting to install both an SSL certificate and an intermediate certificate on an Apache web server. To do this I have had to install mod_ssl (using a2enmod ssl)

First I set that up and restarted Apache, it loaded fine.

Then I set up the certificates and attempted a restart - this appeared in the error logs (error.log);

[Mon Oct 24 04:17:48 2011] [error] Init: Unable to read server certificate from file /etc/apache2/ssl.key/ssl-cert.crt

After some digging I noticed the SSL cert was malformed (everything was on one line), I re-copied everything across for both the main crt and intermediate crt and attempted a restart again, again it failed but this time nothing was written to the error log.

When I run openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in /etc/apache2/ssl.key/ssl-cert.crt I get a modulus returned (something that wasn't happening before I fixed the formatting of text in the files).

If I take out the <VirtualHost *:443> block in my Apache config file, it starts fine.

Apache is running as www-data

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Linux Info

cat proc /etc/*-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=lucid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS"

Apache Info

apache2 -v
Server version: Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu)
Server built:   Sep  1 2011 09:45:41

SSL Info

-rwxrwxr-x  1 root root 1.8K 2011-10-24 04:19 ssl-cert.crt
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root root 1.6K 2011-10-24 04:19 intermediate.crt
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root root 1.7K 2011-10-10 09:24 ssl-cert.key

Site Info

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName www.mysite.co.uk
    DocumentRoot /srv/www/mysite/public_html
    ErrorLog /srv/www/mysite/logs/error.log
    CustomLog /srv/www/mysite/logs/access.log combined
    SSLEngine on
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.key/ssl-cert.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl.key/ssl-cert.key
    SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl.key/intermediate.crt
</VirtualHost>

Answer 1

Did you change the permission of /root or are you running apache as root?
Verify that Apache has permissions to read the files (and folders below).

Also I would not place the certificates in /root, but rather in /etc/apache.

Answer 2

The solution in my case was to check the site specific error logs, I hadn't looked there previously because I thought they only came into action was Apache was up and running.

There was an issue with the generated crt file, which was plain as day once I was in the right logs.