Questions[phusion-passenger](server)

I have a Rails application running on CentOS with Apache/Passenger, and I have a little problem: I don't have any logs for my Rails Application, What am I missing?

This is my apache conf :

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin [email protected]
    ServerName domain.com
    ServerAlias www.domain.com
    Include /home/ftpanel/conf/alias/domain.com.alias
    DocumentRoot /home/mgimmo/public_html/immo/public/

    #Configuration PHP
FastCgiExternalServer /home/mgimmo/ftpanel-config/php5.fpm -socket   /home/ftpanel/conf/sock/mgimmo.sock
    Alias /ftpanel-config/ /home/mgimmo/ftpanel-config/

    <Directory /home/mgimmo/public_html/immo/public/>
            Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
            AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
    ServerSignature Off

I've got an Apache question here.

For my entire career as a developer, I've been restarting Apache like this:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I just today deployed my first Rails application, but I was having trouble getting Apache to restart on the host machine. When I tried it that way, Apache would try to restart, but would ultimately hang.

This, however, worked fine:

sudo apachectl restart

What are the differences between these two techniques? I had assumed that the latter was, at best, "syntactic sugar" for the first, but that must not be the case, given that the latter worked while the former did not.

If it's relevant (and I suspect it may be), this Rails application uses Phusion Passenger. My prior development experience (whereby the former method works fine) is mostly with PHP. I'm pretty new to Rails.

The server in question is runs Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty).

Gollum is GitHub's new wiki engine written in Ruby. Deployed locally it uses a Sinatra instance to provide a web interface.

Is it possible to run it in a shared hosting environment such as Dreamhost using Apache and mod_rails (Phusion Passenger)?

Do you know if it is possible to use Nginx with Shibboleth?

Passenger recently got support for Nginx, what are the pros and cons of it over Apache as a web server for Rails applications?