Re: Apache dies every Sunday, 6:00am

[Dave Sherohman <esper@sherohman.org>]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 06:50:23PM -0500, Matthew Daubenspeck wrote:
> The Subject about says it all. For the life of me I can't track this
> down. For some crazy reason, all apache processes cease to exist just
> after (approx) 6:25am. This is the section of the error.logs:
> 
> [Sun Jan  5 06:25:28 2003] [notice] SIGUSR1 received.  Doing graceful
> restart
> 
> [Sun Jan 12 06:25:29 2003] [notice] SIGUSR1 received.  Doing graceful
> restart

Now hold on just a second, there, cowboy...  Is apache _dying_ or is
it _restarting_?  If you go to http://yourbox.com/ at 6:30 on Sunday
morning, do you get a response?

If so, everything's cool - this is normal for a Debian system for
reasons I'll go into below.

If not, then we have to figure out why the restart fails and the log
messages after the ones you posted are the place to start looking.

> And it has been doing this for quite some time. The only thing I can
> tie it to is a cron job for logrotate. The apache settings have the
> logs rotated on a weekly basis. I have tried to trace down WHY this
> would happen, but came up with nothing.

Telling apache to do a graceful restart is the standard way of
getting it to (among other things) close and reopen its log files.  A
process tracks open files by using a file descriptor, which points at
a location on the disk, not at a file name.  If logrotate just moved
access.log to access.log.0, apache would continue writing to the same
_file_ rather than the same _file name_ - the new access.log would
remain empty and all new log messages would be written to
access.log.0.  This would defeat the purpose of rotating the logs,
so, after moving the old log file, apache is told to restart so that
it will start writing to the new one.

-- 
The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the
White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that
we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened.
  - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html)