[ALUG] Apache fell over

[Matthew]

I'm running Apache 2.2.3 on Debian Etch. It generally runs happily and I
haven't seen any issues since I upgraded the hosting several months ago,
but at the weekend it died and I can't work out why.

I have two things I was hoping people might be able to help with.

/var/log/apache2/error.log includes:
[Sun Oct 21 06:26:54 2007] [warn] child process 11300 still did not exit,
sending a SIGTERM
[Sun Oct 21 06:26:56 2007] [warn] child process 11300 still did not exit,
sending a SIGTERM
[Sun Oct 21 06:26:58 2007] [warn] child process 11300 still did not exit,
sending a SIGTERM
[Sun Oct 21 06:27:00 2007] [error] child process 11300 still did not exit,
sending a SIGKILL
[Sun Oct 21 06:27:01 2007] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down

The last row before that was from a week before, and shouldn't be part of
the same incident. 6am is definitely not a peak time for this box. I
couldn't find anything in any other logs that seemed relevant.

Anyone got any idea what that was, or where I can look for more detail?


Secondly, I really ought to have some mechanism to check on Apache (and
MySQL) periodically and make sure they're running, either restarting them
or alerting me (although I can be difficult to get hold of).
What do people recommend for this? Is it as simple as having cron run a
script to start the daemon if it's not already on the stored PID, or are
there issues I should be wary of?

Thanks,
Matthew