I have installed Apache2 (with mod_ssl enabled) on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86_64) (patchlevel 1), using YaST. Once installed, I tested whether everything works fine so far. SSL also worked fine.

Just 'apache2ctl start' was enough to make everything working.

Then I installed mod_jk and applied the following configuration changes to make it work.

/etc/sysconfig/apache2 (added JK module)

APACHE_MODULES="... ... ... ... ...jk"

/etc/apache2/httpd.conf (included mod_jk.conf)

Include /etc/apache2/mod_jk.conf

/etc/apache2/mod_jk.conf (new file)

JkLogFile                       /var/log/apache2/mod_jk.log
JkWorkersFile           /etc/apache2/mod_jk/workers.properties
JkShmFile                       /etc/apache2/mod_jk/mod_jk.shm

# Set the jk log level [debug/error/info]
JkLogLevel                      info

# Select the timestamp log format
JkLogStampFormat        "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y] "

mod_jk.log & mod_jk.shm files were also created.

/etc/apache2/mod_jk/workers.properties (new file)

worker.list=jira
worker.jira.type=ajp13
worker.jira.host=127.0.0.1
worker.jira.port=8009

Once everything is done, I've restarted Apache using the following command,

apache2ctl restart

Then I observed that SSL is not working. When checked with telnet, I observed that port 443 is not open.

In listen.conf, if I specify port 443 bypassing 'IfDefine' and 'IfModule' conditions, then SSL works properly. This is likely the 'SSL' flag is not passed to Apache. I did not make this a persistent change as I thought it might not be the correct practice.

I checked /etc/sysconfig/apache2 to see if this has been altered, but it is there. Although this flag is enabled, Apache won't start with SSL support.

APACHE_SERVER_FLAGS="SSL"

Finally, I had to start Apache using the following command,

apache2ctl -D SSL -k start

And my question is, why did Apache (or apache2ctl) fail to start with SSL when I have installed and correctly configured mod_jk, and no other configuration changes were applied?

Have I missed anything?

Thanks in advance.

-- Shaakunthala