[rhn-users] How to find out what caused server crash

[Darek]

Hello,

I need help troubleshooting RHE3 Server.
This computer has been rebuild recently and is currently
running 2.4.21-27.0.4.ELsmp.
Last weekend it stopped responding and I can not find the
reason for the failure. We had to reboot the server to
regain the access to it. This server is used for web
application deployed on tomcat. The application is using
Lucene for documents search, and the document indexing
threat was running when the crash occurred. The server had
a problem again during the week. I was told that after
login-in using ssh user got an error about non existing
link in /opt directory, something about inode being
invalid. The mentioned link has never been created on this
machine. 
Also on Wednesday when I tried to replace a file in the
application after running cp command I got a message that
file I am trying to create doesn?t exist. I ?touch
file_name? to create the file in that directory,  and again
I got a message that file I am creating doesn?t exist.
(same when I tried to create this file using vim) I had to
delete that directory and move new copy of the directory
together with the file. (I have tried both the owner of the
directory and root account; the permissions can not be a
problem)

I am not sure how to deal with this. Would this be a
problem with the faulty installation or a hardware failure?
How can I find out what has caused the crash? Or how should
I proceed to troubleshoot this?

Thank you in advance,
DarekC