Heres the deal:
I was curious about learning about webservers and such, so i compiled apache, and started one. I was having fun with it too, but now i've got a problem, not sure whats causing it. I dont know that much about the computer i'm running as a server, it was given to me by my mom who works for the town, its one of the ones the town no longer uses. All was running fine, when i had to shut it down last night to see if i could get my dsl modem working (another long story) and i wanted to take extra 'strain' off the internet line. Anyway, this morning i tried to boot it, and i'm getting all sorts of errors. First, i cant connect to the internet, gets stuck on "Bringing up eth0" and then fails. then a few other things fail, but it moves to quickly for me to see what they are :-/. Now i'm in text mode, and i cant do anything. I try to use startx or xinit to start gnome and get a few errors: (logged in as root)
Could not init font path element unix/:7100, removing from list!

Fatal server error:
could not open default font 'fixed'

then it tells me about reporting errors related to a server crash, and i get another error:
XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
I also cant open the log for free86 because it says i have to be root or trusted user (if you were paying attention, you'd find this odd, because i'm logged in as root)
PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!
~ben
(BTW: i'm using RH9 on my server, its got 128 megs of ram and i believe a P2 processor.)

It is interesting that your post title is about a server not starting when your machine would seem to have a lot more serious problems that need to be resolved before you get to that.

You can review most of your boot messages by invoking dmesg|less. Before you start looking at your XFree86 log, review your system log (messages file).

With the number and seriousness of the problems you are describing, you may either have hardware problems, or you may have been compromised - a non-authorized user may have gained root access and messed your system up to the point you need to reinstall.

Check that you have free disk space in all partitions. Lack of free space in /var can cause failure of services to load when they can't write lock files, or other administrative files.

Boot up in single user mode, then try to bring things up one at a time - starting with you network.

Good luck.