Figured I'd share this with you - just finished 2 hours of sweating
trying to figure out what was happening with my co-lo'd server.

My business partner and I were on IM managing something over
phpMyAdmin when I noticed the "system going down now" reboot message
on my SSH console.  WTF?  Starting to get nervous.

System boots back up and I start grepping through /var/log files -
can't find anything interesting.  While I'm teeing a logfile it
reboots again.  WTF?!?  IM messages from my buddy get a little peeved
and frantic - what am I doing to the server?!? (he's not an admin,
just a web designer), knock it off, etc.  I tell him I have no clue
(shamefully).

Wait for it to come back up again.  Start digging harder and with more
intensity, copy log files to an alternate location, checking that last
night's off-site backup ran, etc.  Noticed that I was on 2.4.27
instead of 2.4.28, figure I better start building a new kernel just in
case.

10 minutes go by and all seems well, except that I still can't find
any indication of what is going on, no hardware messages, everything
looks fabulous except for the typical iptables script kitty rejects.

Goes down again, comes back up, now I'm mad, over the next 20 minutes
it reboots a couple more times.  I tell my buddy to call the ISP and
see if they have any ideas.  I shut down all non-critical services to
see if maybe someone's found an exploit with apache or something.  15
minutes goes by and all's well, start up apache, 5 minutes later down
she goes again.  Start combing through apache logs when it's back up,
trying to imagine what kind of exploit would cause a reboot and not
just shut the thing down alltogether or trash data files or something.

A few more minutes go by and get an IM from my buddy - ISP called
back, power cord was loose.  ARG!  At least they were quick about
finding it.  Makes sense now but during the episode I was thinking
much worse.

Thought I'd share for your amusement...

Josh

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