Sounds to me like your chkservd program is not running, and if it is you may not have the file setup to restart apache if chkservd finds that it's down.
1) SSH into root and do this:
ps -aux
Look under the COMMAND heading for the word &chkservd&. If you don't see that in there then it may not be running. You can also do this:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/chkservd status
If it's not running then do this:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/chkservd start
Now check to see if you have the necessary file to restart apache automatically if it fails... Go to the following directory on your server:
cd /etc/chkserv.d
That directory has files in it that chkservd uses to check the various services that are supposed to be up and running. You should see a file in there named &apache&. If you don't see one that could be the problem. If you don't have it then do this:
vi apache
Once inside the new file insert the following:
#SERVICE = PORT, SEND, RESPONSE, RESTART COMMAND
service[apache]=80,GET / HTTP/1.0,HTTP/1..,/scripts/checkmaxclients;killall -TERM httpd;sleep 2;killall -9 httpd;/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd stop;/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd start;/usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl start
I'm not an expert at this stuff, but I had numerous problems with chkservd early on. My problem was, and still is, that chkservd stops running for some unknown reason. When the checking program stops and services go down they are not restarted. I finally created a little script that checks the status of chkservd and restarts it if it's down.
Hope that will help.
