The reported problem
Today's chapter, much like the other chapters, will start with someone reporting an issue. The issue being reported is that Apache is no longer running on the server, which serves the company's blog: blog.example.com.
A fellow systems administrator who is reporting the issue has explained that someone reported that the blog was down and when he logged into the server he could see Apache was no longer running. At that point, our peer was unsure what to do to continue and asked for our help.
Is Apache really down?
The first thing that we should do when a service is reported as down is to validate that it really is down. This is essentially our duplicate it for ourselves step from our troubleshooting process. With a service such as Apache, we should also validate that it is in fact down fairly quickly.
In my experience, I have often been told that a service is down when it really was not. The server may have been having an issue but it was not technically down....
