server outage - which logs are relevant?

[Dave Stevens]

On Monday, January 14, 2013 11:28:08 PM Patrick Asselman wrote:
> On 2013-01-14 20:49, Dave Stevens wrote:
> > Hello group,
> > 
> > I don't know if this is the best list so if there are suggestions for
> > a better place please let me know.
> > 
> > I help manage a VPS using Ubuntu 10.04.4. It's right up to date with
> > patches; it uses fail2ban to ward off nasties, apparently
> > successfully. Every night at midnight logwatch is run and mails me
> > the
> > output, no surprises there just long boring details about dns
> > resolution failures and failed login attempts.
> > 
> > But twice in six months the virtual machine has become unresponsive
> > during the daily backup which runs at midnight (for about three
> > minutes). Apart from these incidents the site gets 100% uptime.
> > 
> > A mail to the host and a quick reboot gets it back in business. There
> > are two people who get notified, by pingdom, if the computer fails to
> > serve pages, but we are both in the same time zone and in this case
> > both didn't notice until several hours had gone by. This VPS hosts
> > sites that are not overall mission critical for anyone but it is
> > upsetting nonetheless.
> > 
> > I've looked at the apache access and error logs but see nothing very
> > informative there. Other suggestions?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > Dave
> 
> Can you be more specific please?
> What is unresponsive about the server?

doesn't serve web pages

> What does it still do and what does it not do?

well, it mostly doesn't matter, if it doesn't serve pages that's enough

> Does it need a hard reboot?

er, well, yes, so to speak, it's in an open VZ container

> Can you still login?

don't know

> Does it serve web pages?

no

> Does it manage the VPS?

the VPS hosts several domains, about a half dozen, Virtualmin is in use to 
provide management if that's what you want to know.

HTH

Dave

> 
> Best regards,
> Patrick Asselman

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