So a few days back I was ssh’d into my server as usual for IRC and when I got around to looking at it I noticed I had been dropped back to my zsh shell on my laptop disconnected. At first I thought maybe I just lost connection due to a random network failure so I tried to reconnect. Timed out. So I pull up opera and try to load its cacti status page and it seemed apache was dead and not responding. Awesome. At this point I wasn’t sure what to make of the situation. I get a bunch of power failures so that could have been the cause, but usually my server reboots itself after the power is restored. Perhaps the network interfaces went down, or my psu blew out I thought. Unlikely, so I assume it had a kernel panic. I sent off an email about it and was told the server was still running, so no power or psu failure. I had the machine rebooted as there was nothing I could do and everything came back up as expected. Looking through all of the logs didn’t reveal anything to indicate the cause of the downtime. Temperatures were all within normal range according to cacti so it wasn’t an overheating problem. Logs didn’t show anything about the network interface being disabled or failures of any kind, so I believe it just outright had a panic. It is slightly irritating that nothing at all in the logs gives an indication of why it had a kernel panic. I assume if I had physical access the console would have given some information but unfortunately it was a remote machine. For now I’ve enabled an automatic reboot on kernel panics so I don’t have to get it manually rebooted if it ever happens again. Guess I’ll never know why it randomly went down in flames after 50 days of running perfectly fine.