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Symptoms: Server Randomly Rebooting Every Few Hours

  • A Dell PowerEdge R740 production database server has rebooted unexpectedly 6 times in 48 hours.
  • Reboots occur at irregular intervals: 2-6 hours apart, no pattern tied to time of day or workload.
  • No kernel panic messages are captured in /var/log/ or on the serial console.
  • The last reboot output shows clean reboot entries with no associated crash dumps.
  • The application team reports abrupt connection drops; the database does crash recovery each time.
  • System logs (journalctl) end abruptly with no shutdown sequence logged.
  • The server is 3 years old, located in rack B07, and has not had hardware maintenance recently.
  • Ambient temperature in the rack is normal (22C).
  • The BMC (iDRAC) event log shows "Power Cycle" events corresponding to each reboot.
  • mcelog shows a small number of correctable memory errors on DIMM A3.