It came to my attention over the weekend that the Apache webserver running on my server was down for approximately 4 hours on Saturday, and again for about an hour on Sunday.  For some reason, Apache keeps receiving terminate signals and shuts down – but I cannot find any real reason behind it in the logs.  The best guess I can make is that something is going on with Passenger (a.k.a. – mod_rails) with a spawned Ruby on Rails app, but since I love Redmine too much for SCM and project management I’m going to let this one slide.

Anyways, this problem has been addressed.  I installed a process monitor on the server which checks running applications and daemons every minute to make sure they’re up to snuff.  Should Apache crash, hang, or simply take up far too much memory it will be restarted.  So far in the time since it was installed yesterday, it restarted Apache successfully when it was down this morning.  Hopefully I will find a reason behind Apache’s sudden deaths soon so that I do not have to rely on the monit daemon simply to restart it.