Sometimes when you do a /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart, the httpd server doesn't start back up properly because the port is still busy. There needs to be a slight wait between shutting down and then trying to start back up.
I can confirm this. Don't know if the reason is right or not, but restart doesn't alwasy work. Although most of the time you want 'reload' option. /Seva
Isn't that "slight wait" on the order of 120 seconds? One could use something like netcat to try to bind the port in a loop, pausing a few seconds at a time until it succeeds. Then again, httpd could do that for us anyway.
The next release of apache will include a httpd init file which is closely modeled after the 'apachectl' utility that the apache group ships, which we have found people are familiar with. It does server restarts in a different way -- much more like server reloads. Hopefully this will fix the problem. If you want an explicit 'stop' followed by a 'start' you will specify it as such.