On 23/06/10 11:01, Richard Parsons wrote:
Rather than changing to another web server, perhaps it would be better to run an identically configured version of Apache on a test server so that you can try out configuration changes there?
Yes, this would be the "correct" solution.
However, you can never make two systems identical; they'll need to have different IP addresses (and trying to bind to the wrong IP could trigger an error), they'll have different traffic hitting them (and incoming connections might be what triggers an error), etc. That's not to say it's not without value, but in my experience it's as important to make sure a system recovers from an error as it is to try to avoid errors occurring.
MySQL has startup scripts which check that MySQL continues to run and restarts it otherwise, for example; there ought to be something similar for Apache (and I'm not saying there isn't, I just haven't found it if there is!) As far as I know MySQL doesn't have the ability to fall back to a known-good configuration but then MySQL's config doesn't change as often as Apache's does (I don't recall killing MySQL with a bad configuration anyway, but maybe that's selective memory).