I am sorry if this question has been addressed before, I am assuming it has, but after a half hour of searching I couldn't find anything.
Anyway, to the question:
I am a windows guy and a self-taught programmer so I am very new to linux but am liking it more than Windows. We have a small WordPress installation that fails seemingly at random. When I does I cannot SSH in and my only real option is to do a hard reboot from the Rackspace Cloud admin. It has always fixed the problem.
I want to know what I should be doing to determine what actually caused the problem though. This is a trivial example but we are planning on putting more applications on linux in the next year or so and I want to get to the point that I am comfortable dealing with problems in a more scientific way than "unplug it and plug it back in."
Where should I get started? I am open to books, blog posts, server fault questions, videos, seminars, college classes, anything.
Thanks!
Best Answer
This is a general recipe, it works not only on linux:
Identifing problems, in order:
uptime;df -h;free -m
)/var/log/
. System wide logs are/var/log/messages
,/var/log/syslog
. In your case, you could be interested in/var/log/apache
)If you hard rebooted your server, be careful to write down the time you did it. So you could check the logs just before that time.