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I was at school SSHing to my homebox. All of a sudden, my connection was closed. Attempting to reconnect failed. When I returned home, I discovered that my computer was off.

Nobody was at my house and I am sure that I did not have a power outage.

How can I figure out how or why my computer shut off? Is there some log in /var/log that could point me in the right direction? Should there be a core dump somewhere that I should find? If so, how do I use core dumps?

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

The relevant files in /var/log are messages, dmesg

issue, command 'last' to see the exact reboot time. You will see a line starting with 'reboot' (or may be shutdown) for all reboot/crash.
cat /var/log/messages from a terminal and check for messages at the time stamp of reboot or just before it. 'dmesg' can give the last boot time messages.

Hope this helps.

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up vote 4 down vote

It is unusual for a kernel error to shutdown the power, it would either hang with a kernel panic or reboot. It was most likely an hardware issue.

If there was a kernel panic search for "kernel panic" on the logs dir:

grep -r "kernel panic" /var/log
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+1 for suggesting that it is a hardware problem. – Bobby Feb 3 '11 at 19:15
The computer shutdown very well could have been a hardware problem. Sometimes it is a toddler problem. (My two year old loves the shiny blue power button) – kzh Feb 3 '11 at 23:39
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I had a room mate who was an electricity nazi. So I set up wake-on-lan. – djeikyb Feb 4 '11 at 1:09
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