FYI... I had the SAME issue on only ONE of the three of my chilispot servers.

That strange part is that it was working fine for months with a single MAC in the list. Then after I tried to add another MAC to the MACALLOWED list and it just keep closing without any messages as noted above. I couldn't even restore the initial config to make it work again.

When I applied your patch and recompiled everything started working again. I wrongly assumed I had a syntax error somewhere else in my config file. Fortunately, that was not the case.

Thanks for this fix!!

Cheers!