PID file not being created on Debian 7?

[Etienne Levesque Guitard]

I'm having this weird issue where Varnish's init script is not creating the
PID file on Debian 7, which makes it impossible to stop the server via the
service command.

~# service varnish stop
[FAIL] Stopping HTTP accelerator: varnishd failed!

Further inspection reveals the /var/run (symlink to /run) directory doesn't
have the PID file in it when Varnish is running.

The init.d script I have is untouched; it comes from this installation:
https://www.varnish-cache.org/installation/debian

If you don't have the init script on hand, here's the line which is
supposed to create the PID file:

start-stop-demon --start --quiet --pidfile ${PIDFILE} --exec ${DAEMON} --
-P ${PIDFILE} ${DAEMON_OPTS} > ${output} 2>&1;

This extrapolates to:

start-stop-demon --start --quiet --pidfile /var/run/varnishd.pid --exec
/usr/sbin/varnishd -- -P /var/run/varnishd.pid /usr/sbin/varnishd >
$(/bin/tempfile -s.varnish) 2>&1;

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Etienne Levesque Guitard
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