Hopefully someone can help me with this...

I went to check my web sites today and discovered that they were inaccessible. When I checked my server, a RedHat 7.1 box, I discovered that the DNS server and the mail server were both shut down. I started up both of them and everything worked just fine afterwards.

But, why did this happen? This isn't the first time this has happened. It seems that this occurs every so often. Is there a log file that I can check to see what the problem is?

Thanks in advance.

It depends on how your syslogd is configured, but you will probably want to start with /var/log/messages.

You might just look through the other logs in your /var/log directory too.

Thanks bitserve :-) (just kidding, thanks Mark).

I took a look at the log and it appears that the system restarted for some reason.

Here's where it appears that the restart occurred...
--------------------
Mar 22 03:40:07 ns1 kernel: usb-ohci.c: USB suspend: usb-00:02.0
Mar 22 03:40:07 ns1 kernel: usb-ohci.c: USB continue: usb-00:02.0 from host wakeup
Mar 22 03:42:37 ns1 syslogd 1.4-0: restart.
Mar 22 03:42:37 ns1 syslog: syslogd startup succeeded
--------------------

Is there some way that I can set up my system that if it restarts on it's own again, that all the servers (Apache, DNS, mySQL, etc) will restart automatically?

Thanks again.

Wow. It looks like you're having some problems. Maybe someone else can jump in here, but it looks like your machine might be going to sleep or something. Do you have any USB devices plugged into the server? You might try disabling apmd and any power management stuff in the bios.

/etc/rc.d/init.d/apmd stop
/sbin/chkconfig --level 0123456 apmd off

You probably just need to add some scripts for your services to the Sys V init scripts, to start them upon reboot.

Look in your /etc/rc.d/init.d/ directory. There should be a script in there to restart each service at certain runlevels. You may want to read the docs for the DNS server and mailserver, as they probably have some example scripts that you can use for this.

Also, do a man on chkconfig.

Thanks Mark. Looks like I've got some homework to do.