Apache not working after reboot, varnish unable to start

So I rebooted my server and everything seemed to be working, mysql, apache everything running but the websites werent loading. I could not instantly remember the cause because a machine reboot is not something you do on your server every day.

The reason was I had varnish installed and it failed to start after reboot because of “compilers access tweak” . I already had varnish added to allowed users but still it did not start.

So, if you have varnish install and after a reboot if your websites fail loading even if apache is running; check varnish status and if you are getting errors such as:

  • VCL compilation failed
  • Permission denied
  • compiler failed, exited with code 1

the compilers may be the culprit.