Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Can someone recommend a good way to watch the server?

Restarting AOLserver when it crashes is trivial, just run it from /etc/inittab. Or use Daemontools, which is a different and more modern way to accomplish basically the same thing. inittab is simpler, and all Unix systems have it. Daemontools is more flexible.

Crontab is of course a good way to schedule a periodic keep-alive job to check that your AOLserver is not wedged. If AOLserver is wedged, the keepalive script merely kills AOLserver, which init or Deemontools then restarts.

Isn't this all in the OpenACS install docs? I thought it was, and hope it is.

Periodically restarting an AOLserver which is performing normally shouldn't really necessary, but if you want to do it just call ns_shutdown from within AOLserver.