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i run a dedicated server and my hosting provider sent me an email reporting this and in 20 mins the service is recovering. i am running centos with softlayer

Service Issue: SERVICE PING failed for 184.xx.xx.xxx

What exactly does this mean? does it mean the site is down? How to fix or diagnoise the problem.

pbu
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3 Answers3

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It looks self explanatory. Try pinging that IP address. There are so many reasons this could be happening, you'll need to dig further on your own.

Ryan Babchishin
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This can mean pretty much anything, but one of the things it means is that your server is not responding to pings. This can mean:

  • Your server is down.
  • Your server is too busy to respond. (DOS? Software bug?)
  • Your server's firewall is blocking ICMP. (Probably not, since they send you emails when it doesn't ping, but you know. Completeness.)
  • There is some other kind of network connectivity issue between your server and the system trying to ping it.

Based on this, no, you cannot assume that apache is down. The way you tell if apache is down is you monitor whether apache is serving web pages with the monitoring tool of your choice, or you load a web page from the server yourself, manually, or you log in and see if apache is running.

Check your server logs and see if anything interesting appears there.

Katherine Villyard
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Service ping is part of SoftLayer basic monitoring (stuff you get for free) It essentially pings the server with set interval and generates warnings if server is not responding to ping.

For start turn on the Nimsoft monitoring for hardware resources. This will tell you what is happening with actual host.

If you are ready to spend few dollars (I think its 5$) you can also update to Nimsoft advanced or premium monitoring and hook up apache and mysql plus host of other processes to monitoring directly.

http://www.softlayer.com/server-monitoring

Ps. I work for SoftLayer.

Kimmo Hintikka
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