Edit: While this appears to be due to a power outage at Linode's Fremont facility, I've still had a problem with this in the past. Any help would be appreciated.
I want you to teach me to fish.
Yes, I'm asking "Why is my VPS crashing?" I'm sure if I gave you root access to my server you could find out in 2 minutes. I'm sure you could tell me to post my error logs, and I'd hunt them down without much thought. But that's not what I want.
I want you to teach me to fish.
I'm running into a problem that has no root cause apparent to me. See my Linode graphs to see what I mean. The crash is happening at a time when network traffic and disk IO is at a minimum.
What are the first, most common, most basic places I should look when this happens, and what should I be looking for?
How can I be alerted when this happens (so I don't miss it for 8 hours while the server's down)?