Gareth Hunt Firefox Addons, Mobile Web and living in the USA

Cygwin: died waiting for dll loading

Over the weekend I was trying to use mod_rewrite with apache 2 webserver for cygwin and kept getting the following error:

11086085 [main] httpd2 4492 fork: child 5492 - died waiting for dll loading, errno 11

It seemed obvious that cygwin was unable to load some dependency for mod_rewrite. After a little googling, I found a suggestion to rebase cygwin. The procedure is as follows:

1. Shutdown cygserver (if running): net stop cygserver.
2. Close all cygwin windows.
3. Open Start->Run
4. rebase has to be run from an ash shell, so type C:\path\to\cygwin\bin\ash.exe
5. Once the shell window in open: $ cd /bin
6. $ ./rebaseall
7. $ exit to close the window

After this, I restarted the cygserver service and apache and mod_rewrite worked perfectly.