On Wed, Oct 24, 2007 at 01:04:13PM +0100, Matthew wrote:
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?
Hmm, that looks at around the right time for a logrotate, which includes a graceful to apache... I'd guess that there was something making apache very very unhappy - but it's hard to tell from that!
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?
I'd test the services as apposed to the PIDs that you think they should have... throw a test page up on apache with some known content and then test against that every once in a while... I'm also not one for automatically restarting services - it masks potential issues which then may go unnoticed for a long time. We use nagios + clickatell (sms service) to monitor our systems - with a period between about 11.30pm and 6.30am where smses aren't sent (thank god!).
Hope that helps,