A couple of hours ago we got a system crash on Ubuntu 12.04. We checked all the log files and there is nothing suspicious to blame to.

Last stuff that was logged was some dovecot activity. There are no kernel panic messages. Nothing.

It is a new server (new hardware) we are testing before production. And because it is new hard, I'm suspicious the problem may be due to some faulty hardware.

We already run memtester with no problem detected. I'll be happy to hear from other hardware testing tools (the machine has SSD).

Anyway, the thing I wanted to ask you is a different one. The strange thing is on every open file at the moment of the crash we found the next sequence of symbols was written into them: "@^@^@^@^@^@^@...".

For example, on the syslog log file we got:

Apr 16 15:53:56 odyssey dovecot: pop3-login: Aborted login (auth failed, 1 attempts): user=<info>, method=PLAIN, rip=46.29.255.73, lip=5.9.58.177
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^ [these continues for about 1000 chars...] ^@^@^@^@Apr 16 15:55:12 odyssey kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started.

We got all these symbols in all open files. These include: syslog, mail.log, kern.log, ... But also on some logs that are output by php scripts run in CRONs from user accounts (not root).

So, any idea why all open files got these characters written during the crash? This is pretty bad since the crash corrupted many files (we don't even know which other ones may be affected). We are suspicious that all open files (in write mode maybe) at the moment of the crash got all these symbols inserted. Why is that?

BTW [in case it helps], the system automatically rebooted after the crash but Apache did not start. There were not traces in /var/apache2/*log why apache did not start. After running a "service apache2 start" it started with no problems. Also, we rebooted the machine manually and Apache also started on reboot. But it did not start after the crash and no errors were reported.

Thanks guys!