I run a CentOS 4 server. to run game servers. earlier someone reported to me that their server was offline. So i tried to login via ssh with no luck and all my other methods of connecting to it didn't work (I didn't bother to ping it though i should of done that). I concluded that theres a networking issue or the server crashed. So i sent a server reboot request which happened in a few minutes.

I was able to login via SSH after it happened (I beleive my IPTables need to be reset after rebooting which is a good thing I guess). first thing I did was check my IPtables script and i saw that there was a typo in the script (which may have casued me to not be able to connect to the server)

Is there a way to determine if the server crashed? or if it was a typo in my IPTables script? I'd like to know before this situation happens again.

Check your logs..