Caught SIGTERM, shutting down on centos server

Question

I have a centos server, and when I start apache I get the following in the log:

[Tue Dec 13 02:26:54 2011] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Tue Dec 13 02:26:55 2011] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec)
[Tue Dec 13 02:26:56 2011] [notice] ModSecurity for Apache/2.5.9 (http://www.modsecurity.org/) configured.
[Tue Dec 13 02:26:56 2011] [notice] Original server signature: Apache/2.2.21 (EL) DAV/2
[Tue Dec 13 02:26:56 2011] [notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication ...
[Tue Dec 13 02:26:56 2011] [notice] Digest: done
[Tue Dec 13 02:26:57 2011] [notice] mod_python: Creating 4 session mutexes based on 256 max processes and 0 max threads.
[Tue Dec 13 02:26:57 2011] [notice] Apache/2.2.21 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.1.6 mod_python/3.2.8 Python/2.4.3 Apache/2.2.0 (Fedora) mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.8.8 configured -- resuming normal operations

can anyone help with fixing: caught SIGTERM, shutting down I have installed modsecurity, MaxClients is set to 256 , and I definitely have enough ram. Also there are no crons setup. The error I get is when I start / restart apache. Centos 5.7 64 bit had been installed on the server recently.

Finally I have also tried reinstall of apache.

Thanks

Answer 1

Are you restarting Apache through /etc/init.d/httpd restart ?

If you are, be aware that 'restart' is in fact a 'stop' followed by a 'start'. The stop is defined as:

stop() {
echo -n $"Stopping $prog: "
killproc -p ${pidfile} -d ${STOP_TIMEOUT} $httpd
RETVAL=$?
echo
[ $RETVAL = 0 ] && rm -f ${lockfile} ${pidfile}
}

and killproc:

killproc sends signals to all processes that use the specified executable. If no signal name is specified, the signal SIGTERM is sent.

Which mean that it is normal for you to see that "caught SIGTERM, shutting down" message.