[GTALUG] server questions - - help needed

[o1bigtenor]

On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 5:54 PM, William Park via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 03, 2018 at 02:47:13PM -0500, o1bigtenor via talk wrote:
>> Greetings
>>
>> I am quite new at running a server so hopefully the question isn't too
>> out there.
>>
>> My server has been operational for about a year and I am working on a
>> number of different projects on it. Twice now (this last friday and 5
>> weeks early I came into the office to find that the server has somehow
>> been taken down and  has rebooted itself (process setup in the bios)
>> but as it doesn't quite complete the boot process, I have to hit a key
>> to tell it to continue and then finally to log in to read Debian
>> (stable).
>
> Who does the stopping?  BIOS or Linux kernel?

Bios - - - need to hit F2 (IIRC) to kick the bios in the pants and
then I can get
to the os prompt a little later.
>
> I ask because, my machine always stops at BIOS prompt when power comes
> back.  I don't know why.  I set the BIOS to "power off" when power comes
> back, so it should stay turned off, but it doesn't.
>
>>
>> So I am trying to determine what may have caused the system to do a
>> reboot, whilst I have my suspicions I want to figure out exactly what
>> is happening to cause this kind of behavior. AIUI servers should be
>> able to run happily for years without issues (barring hardware
>> problems) so I want that kind of reliability. Where in /var/log will I
>> be finding the most clues as to the events that lead up to this
>> 'reboot'?
>
> /var/log/message
> /var/log/syslog
> /var/log/debug
>

Thanks - - - that last one was quite useful.

Dee