I agree that it sounds odd, and some of my original diagnostic must be skewed. After several configuration changes and system reconfigurations and nginx restarts, I do appear to have a sensible state currently, and I can’t reliably reproduce the problems I had before. I’m also pretty sure I didn’t imagine it all, though.
Here’s something else I ran into while getting there: At some point, nginx was running, even after calling # herd stop nginx and herd did list it as stopped. That nginx instance that got away from shepherd might have been involved in the earlier trouble. (Is it ok for shepherd to lose track of a child like that?) Another thing was that I got a failed nginx configuration test that didn’t make sense. Notably, it complained that (a) the user directive `user nginx nginx;` is ineffective when when not running as root and (b) it didn’t have permission to access the letsencrypt keys. Both of these indicate that the configuration test was not run as root. I don’t see any reason in the code why that would happen… I’ll keep an eye on it and see if something similar occurs again.
