HTTPD and SENDMAIL (maybe others) go dead after weeks

I'm no linux guru, but I get around the OS fine. I deployed a CentOS 5 server and with PHP 5, Apache 2.2 and MySQL 5 a couple of months ago. I noticed that apache and sendmail just go dead after a few weeks (2 times that it has happened so far, and I'm guessing it will happen again). Had to kill the services and restart them. I have no clue how to diagnose this.

Can someone point me to a direction, how to log it when it happens again (if its not already logged, or at all possible) etc.

Could it be hardware related? It's a Xeon with Intel Entry board with 2G DDR2 533

Thanks guys!


Dan

re: HTTPD and SENDMAIL (maybe others) go dead after weeks

It's a bit of a red flag to me that both apache and sendmail go silent. To me that makes me want to investigate some external problem - a network issue of some sort - maybe something in your network is conflicting your server or diverting his traffic.

I don't know what your network setup is like, and I won't claim to know much about networking, in fact, I hate it.

Anyway, your apache is probably logging stuff unless you've told it not to. You could start by looking at the logs. Your httpd.conf file will tell you where the log lives. I never set up a sendmail so I don't know about it's logging. You could also try poking through your other logs just to see if anything fishy is going on.

re: HTTPD and SENDMAIL (maybe others) go dead after weeks

ya thanks, logs is the first thing I checked, they all looked cleaned and in order (as if the services were still running but no requests have been made)

"frozen logs" i guess is a good description.

The server has not had this problem since, so I'm hoping I don't see it again, if I do I'll be sure to post the solution here, if anybody else is having the same issue. (Don't hold your breath though)



Dan