I recently encountered a problem with rebooting on my CentOS 6.6 VPS (hosted with Media Temple on their DV Developer service). I discovered that I had some sort of memory leak a few months ago; since I'm not proficient enough with server admin to troubleshoot that, a scheduled weekly reboot via cron fixed my problems right up.
Things were running along just fine until last week's reboot. The system shut down but apparently never came back up; I needed to log into my Parallels Power Panel interface to be able to start the server again (just clicked the "Start" button and it came up immediately). Same problem this week.
I tried rebooting from ssh: same problem. The server shuts down but never comes back up. However, I can manually start it from my Power Panel after that. I tried both the reboot and /sbin/shutdown -r now commands (one is just an alias of the other, I think). In cron, I'm using /sbin/shutdown -r now. Curiously, if I hit the restart button in my Power Panel, everything goes perfectly.
I checked out this similar question, but like another commenter stated, I don't have console access to try ps aux once the system starts shutting down. I also took a shot in the dark and ran yum update to make sure everything was up to date and am still experiencing the issue.
In case it is helpful, here is the relevant section from my /var/log/messages:
Dec 7 07:22:52 megangarwood init: console main process (790) killed by TERM signal
Dec 7 07:22:52 megangarwood init: tty2 main process (793) killed by TERM signal
Dec 7 07:22:52 megangarwood fail2ban.server[769]: INFO Stopping all jails
Dec 7 07:22:52 megangarwood fail2ban.actions.action[769]: ERROR iptables -D INPUT -p tcp --dport 25000 -j fail2ban-SSH#012iptables -F fail2ban-SSH#012iptables -X fail2ban-SSH returned 100
Dec 7 07:22:52 megangarwood rsyslogd-2177: imuxsock begins to drop messages from pid 869 due to rate-limiting
Dec 7 07:22:53 megangarwood fail2ban.jail[769]: INFO Jail 'ssh-iptables' stopped
Dec 7 07:22:53 megangarwood fail2ban.server[769]: INFO Exiting Fail2ban
Dec 7 07:22:53 megangarwood saslauthd[595]: server_exit : master exited: 595
Dec 7 07:22:58 megangarwood clamd[529]: Pid file removed.
Dec 7 07:22:58 megangarwood clamd[529]: --- Stopped at Sun Dec 7 07:22:58 2014
Dec 7 07:22:58 megangarwood clamd[529]: Socket file removed.
Dec 7 07:22:59 megangarwood kernel: Kernel logging (proc) stopped.
Dec 7 07:22:59 megangarwood rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="5.8.10" x-pid="496" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] exiting on signal 15.
And then I got nothing until I manually hit the start button on the Power Panel (at which point the server starts as expected).
I'm really not sure how to troubleshoot this issue going forward. Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this problem. :)
I was able to get console output after getting in touch with Media Temple and messing with Java's security settings. Here is the relevant portion of the output:
init: re-executing init
init: failed to re-execute init: no such file or directory
I verified that the /sbin/init file exists, but I'm not sure where to go from here.
