Linux – lighttpd start/stop/restart script doesn’t work

I found the answer one this page. Here is the content below, in case the link ever goes dead.

Basically I needed to create a fastcgi.crash.log file with the appropriate write permissions and all my problems were solved.

lighttpd, fcgi, rails and child exited with status 9, 1, 2, 3 or X
By Giulio Turetta

Ok, these errors are not good. They didn’t tell much about what happended.
But you can’t do as I did. Don’t wander on the dark side of the system…
Just try to execute your FCGI as your lighttpd did.
Find your lighttpd user in lighttpd configuration file (debian: /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf).
On my configuration I see:
server.username  = “www-data”

so…

$ su
# cd /my_rails_root/public
# sudo -u www-data ./dispatch.fcgi

Read what’s happen and solve.
That’s all! 

Ubuntu has an init system for starting various services on boot, depending on the runlevel that is booted into. Apache by default adds itself to the various /etc/rc*.d/ when you install it through apt, so it gets started by default for most runlevels.

To remove the startup links to the init script for apache2, you'll want to run something like:

 update-rc.d apache2 disable

This should give you an output like:

Disabling system startup links for /etc/init.d/apache2 ...
Removing any system startup links for /etc/init.d/apache2 ...
/etc/rc0.d/K09apache2
/etc/rc1.d/K09apache2
/etc/rc2.d/S91apache2
/etc/rc3.d/S91apache2
/etc/rc4.d/S91apache2
/etc/rc5.d/S91apache2
/etc/rc6.d/K09apache2

And now apache won't start on boot. You can still start it manually using the script in /etc/init.d:

/etc/init.d/apache2 start

To see what services are currently enabled for boot-time startup, you can use a tool like chkconfig, which I don't believe is installed by default but is available in the repositories.

edit: if you don't want apache running at all, you might be better off just uninstalling it.