In an earlier post I related how I had moved to letsencrypt for tarragon. In the process of doing some cleanup of the /etc/letsencypt directory, and my repository, I managed to stupidly get one wrong private key file into the batch of all the https vhosts, such that the http config file for xyz.com specified an SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile which did not match.

It took me hours and hours to figure this out, because Apache simply fails to start and gives no indication whatever what has pissed him off. I wasn’t too stupid to figure out that I had been messing with the certs yesterday, and the problem might lie there somehow. But I have about 15 vhosts, so it was tedious. In the end I resorted to strace, and saw the problem.