nginx + hhvm, continued

So after my last post on this, HHVM stopped working again, making nginx give a 502 as usual.

This time, a comment on a forum (who knows which, I looked at a lot of pages) gave me a little snippet that helped me pinpoint the issue:
# netstat -plunt | grep hhvm

This should have told me that HHVM was listening on a TCP port (since that’s what the default for HHVM is). But netstat reported nothing. After checking my configuration, I had forgotten that I had iptables drop all traffic to 127/8 that doesn’t use loopback. Here’s the snippet I use in my iptables configuration file
-A INPUT -d 127.0.0.0/8 -j REJECT

Commented the line out, imported the new ruleset into iptables and iptables didn’t block traffic sent from nginx to HHVM anymore, letting everything work as is supposed to.

Now I’m hoping it doesn’t die again due to some other reason. This was really annoying.