> When I first turned this on, I set the directive in the configuration file to “Conneption: Keep Alive.” Apache began laughing hysterically at my typing skills, and promptly crashed
So a syntax error is now a "crash?". Web developers...
Lots of production installations don't use distro-supplied binaries for their critical services (and there are lots of good reasons for doing this). They generally won't work with (or have) the distro-supplied initscripts.
Note that systemd makes it a lot cleaner and simpler to supply your own service definitions, so eventually your intuition will probably be right, and systemctl will be the proper interface to everything.
I.e run the proper init script (which might also do other checks), not just test the apache config, as you wouldn't also just start apache with apachectl.
Even if you have your own version of apache compiled, you should still provide your own init script, and write in in the standard service way.
So a syntax error is now a "crash?". Web developers...