"Matthew" <matthew@somewhatunlikely.com> wrote: [...]
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?
You can do it that way, but there are many pitfalls to beware and such auto-starters can make mild problems much much worse in some situations. Nevertheless, I think I often use monit for such tasks. Hope that helps, -- MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 - Webmaster-developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder, consumer and workers co-operative member http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ - Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/