server outage - which logs are relevant?

[Patrick Asselman]

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?
What does it still do and what does it not do?
Does it need a hard reboot?
Can you still login?
Does it serve web pages?
Does it manage the VPS?

Best regards,
Patrick Asselman