I was setting up a FreeBSD system to use Apache, and I was running into some problems getting it to start normally. I had the following in my /etc/rc.conf file:

hostname="grtest.domain.name.com"
ifconfig_em0="DHCP"
...

and in my /etc/hosts file:

::1 localhost
127.0.0.1 localhost


I was getting assigned a good IP, but when I would attempt to start Apache, I would get an error message similar to

[Thu Aug 18 11:05:11] [alert] httpd: Could not determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName

What I had to do to fix the issue was to add a private IP for my NIC. I did this via the FreeBSD Diary’s instructions, which involved:

1. Adding the following line to /etc/hosts:
   192.168.0.1 grtest grtest.domain.name.com
2. Adding line to /etc/rc.conf to add IP automatically to NIC on boot:
   ifconfig_em0_alias="inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xffffffff"
3. Add IP to NIC via the command:
   ifconfig em0 alias 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xffffffff
4. Restart apache, noting no longer an error:
   /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2.sh restart

Now it will still give me a public IP from the DHCP, but now works so that Apache will start correctly.

I was having a similar problem on a Gentoo Linux system before I scrapped it, so a similar solution would probably have fixed that issue as well.