My server rebooted for an unknown reason..

[J]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 11:20, Maxime Alarie <malarie at processia.com> wrote:

> I have Ubuntu server 9.1 with no UI.  This week-end my server rebooted for
> some unknown reason to me.  I tried to check in the logs but nothing led me
> to the reason.     I  don’t think it’s a security update installation,
> usually   (I think) you have to reboot the server yourself… If not, is there
> a place I can check to see if the automatics/security  updates are turned
> on?

Is this a "real" server or a desktop you're using as a server?

most rack servers have a management controller built in or added on
(at least all the ones I've ever worked on) that will allow you to log
in to the BMC and check the machine logs for problems.

It's been my experience that sudden, spontaneous reboots with no
messages in the OS logs tends to indicate a hardware issue, either a
failing CPU or piece of RAM, something throwing an NMI, or overheating
or PDU problem.

That being said, here's a little bit about unattended-upgrades package

https://help.ubuntu.com/9.04/serverguide/C/automatic-updates.html

and this:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates

If you have unattended-upgrades installed, there's a line in the conf
file that lets you specify whether you want automatic reboots or not.

However, if you check your logs (messages and syslog) for any
legitimate reboot, you should see a series of shutdown messages
followed by the startup messages from the reboot.

If you see normal system messages followed immediately by startup
messages, that's an indication that something went wrong and the
system rebooted itself due to some error outside the OS.

Also, do you have any watchdog timers set that monitor for OS crashes
and such that could be triggering a reboot if the watchdog thinks that
the server is hung?

Cheers
Jeff