note: This article is intended for a technical audience -- you should use caution when modifying a production system -- caveat emptor.
Sometimes, Ubuntu (and before it, Debian) drives me up the wall.
Recently, an apache2.2-common upgrade saw fit to blow away my /etc/apache2/mods-enabled directory, but not recreate the defaults, so I was left with an empty directory and a server that wouldn't restart due to various errors that looked similar to:
"Invalid command 'Order', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration"?"
Looking around on the web, this doesn't appear to be a new issue, but it doesn't appear to be terribly well answered either -- all I knew, was that I had a box that needed SSL, PHP, Expiry Headers and well, that's it -- aside from the basic functionality.
My first test was to purge the package and re-install it, which did give me back the functionality I wanted, together with a bunch of other modules I didn't need -- I proceeded to leave it and go to bed, only to be greeted with a message from the hosting provider telling me i'd overblown my shared-hosting's RAM quota for the day and that my account was temporarily suspended.
So, I removed the directory and started working piece by piece to put things back together until both Wordpress and OSCommerce booted up and ran correctly.
note: You can also do this with Apache's handy a2enmod program, but i'm a purist -- so i'm going to do it here via 'ln -s'.
First, to obtain basic functionality, you'll need to log in as root (or sudo to root) and issue the following commands, depending on which error your Apache 2.2 installation gives you.
If you see: "Invalid command 'Order', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration?", run:
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/authz_default.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/authz_default.load
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/authz_host.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/authz_host.load
If you see: "Invalid command 'DirectoryIndex', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration?", run:
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/dir.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.load
If you see: "Invalid command 'Alias', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration?", run:
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/alias.conf /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/alias.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/alias.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/alias.load
If you see: "Invalid command 'AddType', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration?", run:
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/mime.conf /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/mime.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/mime.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/mime.load
If you don't see any of those, but Wordpress 2.6.x (or 2.7.x) will not let you login (ie. you can install it, and you see the admin screen, but you get 'permission denied', 'forbidden' or a directory index -- rather than your admin dashboard) then try running:
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/asis.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/asis.load
and restart Apache.
update [12-12-2008]: Wordpress 2.7 will fail to install unless you have the 'env' module installed, so you may also need to run:
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/env.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/env.load
Once you've restarted, your Apache installation should basically work -- to add advanced functionality, you should visit the Apache 2.2 Modules Documentation pages and adapt the lines above to suit the function you need.
