httpd core file path warning at service start even though CoreDumpDirectory is specified

Issue

• Recently, when I restarted Apache on one of our RHEL5 servers, I saw this output:

[root@rhelHost ~]# /etc/init.d/httpd restart
Stopping httpd:                                            [  OK  ]
Starting httpd: 2014-01-03 16:12:45 +0000 - [23849/2928546672] - <Config> - Warning! Core file path not specified, Core file will not be genarated
2014-01-03 16:12:45 +0000 - [2928546672] - <Info> - tracing initialized, level = 1
2014-01-03 16:12:45 +0000 - [2928546672] - <Warning> - The console thread is not yet started  [  OK  ]

• What confused me was the core file warning. We do specify a path to which core files should be dumped:

[root@rhelHost ~]# grep -i dump /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
CoreDumpDirectory /etc/httpd/logs/apache-gdb-dump

• Testing the configuration shows that it does work, so why do we get that warning?:

[root@rhelHost ~]# pgrep -lf httpd | tail -n1
23917 /usr/sbin/httpd

[root@rhelHost ~]# kill -SEGV 23917

[root@rhelHost ~]# ll -a /var/log/httpd/apache-gdb-dump
total 5304
drwxr-sr-x 2 apache apache     4096 Jan  3 16:13 .
drwxr-sr-x 4 apache apache    77824 Jan  3 16:12 ..
-rw------- 1 apache apache 16556032 Jan  3 16:13 core.23917