The Instance was down twice last night. The first time I restarted MariaDB from my phone via a SSH session. The second time it was near time to go home when I noticed so I let it be until I could get to the house. I decided that seeing I cannot seem to get the services tweaked for all cases and I have not seen what is causing them to crash. Though PHP-FPM and MariaDB take turns shutting down on the Instance. I would at least like to make sure the Instance does not stay down for a prolonged period of time. I wrote a quick and dirty bash script to check the services on the Instance and to start them if they are not active. I then added a line on the system crontab to run the script every 15 minutes. So in a worse case scenario the Instance could be down for 15 minutes if it happens to go down directly after a check. For now this will make sure the Instance stays up until I can find out what is causing the shutdowns and fix the issues. I am sure there are many and it is not just one simple problem. 😉

If any other administrator is curios the script is quite simple.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Check to be sure all services are active, if not start them
# This shell script is invoked by cron every 15 minutes on this server
# note: The script does nothing if the services are active.

apache_status=$(systemctl is-active httpd)
mariadb_status=$(systemctl is-active mariadb)
phpfpm_status=$(systemctl is-active php-fpm)

if [ "$mariadb_status" == "failed" ]; then
	systemctl start mariadb
fi

if [ "$phpfpm_status" == "failed" ]; then
       systemctl start php-fpm
fi

if [ "$apache_status" == "failed" ]; then
	systemctl start httpd
fi

unset apache_status
unset mariadb_status
unset phpfpm_status

This of course only works if you are using systemd to manage your services on your system. I named the script services (no extension as bash scripts should not have an extension in most cases). I also invoke it in via cron every 15 minutes. The crontab is located in /etc/crontab for most 'nix type systems. I put the bash script in /var/www/html/bin where all the other Instance scripts are. You should have cron run the script as root so that the services can be started if need be.

# Example crontab line in /etc/crontab
# insert this at the end of the current crontab

*/15 * * * * root cd /var/www/html/bin; ./services

Sorry for the inconvenience of the Instance being down.