SuSE 9.3 - System went down; what log files should I be looking for to find out why?
 

The company I work at had a largish server running SuSE 9.3 go down the night before last. (Not sure if it's a 'server-edition' copy of SuSE; hardware is a server, and it's used as one, but all I know about the OS is SuSE 9.3; I'm sorry I can't provide more specifics.)

Other boxes in the same area were running when we got in, but this one was not. It appeared to be at first (blinking lights), but could not be pinged or ssh'd into until after it was reset. The other boxes are not on the same UPS, and I will be following up that possibility as best I can to determine if it was a simple power failure/UPS outage, but if not...

I've found the files /var/log/messages and /var/log/warn with timestamps from around the time the server went down; none of the other files I was able to look at in /var/log had any entries older than the time the machine was repowered. What other log files might exist that I should be looking at to determine what may have happened?

/var/log/messages will be the main one.

If you could have gotten in on the console before the reboot running "dmesg" might have given you extra information. The dmesg stuff isn't time stamped so you don't always know if what you're seeing there is from a boot a year ago or from an event 5 minutes ago but looking at it in tandem with messages might help give an idea.

I would also recommend checking hardware logs to see if the hardware malfunctioned.

Is it a branded server?