Is there such a thing?

My server crashed and all I can find are oxide logs. Im pretty sure there are more logs available but my host is not letting me see those.

I'm getting super annoyed by my host. So my server has crashed and I cant find any logs. All I find are oxide logs with useless information about chat messages and stuff. Back when the server was online people including me couldnt connect eventhough the rcon showed all fine. People would get "Connection Attempt Failed". After 10 minutes or so the problem went away and I could connect fine.

However I need to find the cause of these issues but my host keeps saying that the logs inside the oxide folder are the server logs.

How do I tell these people that there are supposed to be actual server logs? I mean there should be logs somewhere that will tell you the cause of the crash right? Where do I find those?





Ok the issues keep adding up, I am really hoping that someone is able to give me some insight because my gaming server and community is going down fast with these issues.

I'll try explain from the start:

I have had this server for almost 5 months now and in the last month it is becoming increasingly popular. Two weeks ago my server was starting to have huge lag issues. The thing is I havent changed anything that could be causing this. No new plugins. I keep everything up to date. I wipe every week.

To counter these issues I have reinstalled my entire server, configurated every plugin from scrartch and only put back the most important stuff like ranks and player RP and so on.

Now a week later I am getting reports of laggyness again and rubber banding.

It also will kick players for packet flood. I am unable to track down this issue and when contacting my host they keep insisting there are no logs except for the stuff that is in the oxide folder. Inside the oxide folder I only find useless stuff like chat logs, nothing server-related. This makes it very impossible for me to track down the possible issue.

When asking my host about this they keep insisting there is nothing else to look at. And instead they keep recommanding me (they have recommanded this 5 times already) to move me to a new machine thus getting a new ip. I have had servers seen die before because of this so I do not want this. Yet they keep recommanding this as solution. Now i'm getting kinda confused about this, why would they keep recommanding this? It doesnt make any sense. Why move it to a new machine/new ip while a reinstall should work fine? And why dont they give me access to the full logs? They exist somewhere right? I feel like these guys arent transparent at all to their customers or something shady is going on. It makes no sense to recomand moving to a new ip 5 times over a reinstall (which I already did). Is the machine my server is on maybe not suitable anymore? Or is the network its on not suitable anymore? I have no idea what way of thinking server host companies have but something here doesnt add up. My server has become way bussier the last few weeks so I think maybe they are giving the less populated servers a machine/network thats less good so the current hardware or network cant keep up with my growing server?

Anyway sorry for the long story but im just not following it anymore now and I want to get to the bottom of this but I am not sure how.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Unless you have actual crash dump files in your server install location, it likely isn't a crash. Many shared hosts will limit your memory, so it is more likely that the server is running out or memory and being restarting by the host.

As far as logs go, Rust no longer has the Unity log (output_log.txt), but we are looking on adding something back to handle that. The oxide/logs are mainly just Oxide-specific and plugin-related log output, not your server itself.

My host has confirmed that it has more than enough memory (even after I asked if upgrading my plan would help) so I think they are right about that. I had a different host in the past which did in fact limit my memory but then I could also see this in the crash log that it ran out of memory. But with my current host no such thing is present, and they also confirmed that the hardware space wasnt the issue even after I asked them if upgrading my hardware (thus paying them more) would help. So I think they are honest about that part.

However the server actually did went offline, the rust rcon was no longer being able to connected to and it did restart. So I think that counts as a crash then?

What is the best way to try to track down the cause of this issue?

Like I mentioned previously, if the server was actually crashing, there'd generally be indication to that such as crash dump files. Without any information on that though, I would assuming it isn't an actual crash.

Couldn't it be that the host is locking me out of such files?

because how do I find out what the 30minutes of down time was if it wasnt a crash then?

I've been dealing with hosts for many years and my advice is that once you lose confidence in your host it's time to be proactive and get a new one as soon as possible, no matter how painful it may seem. They will feed you BS and keep you in the dark for as long as possible while you are paying them. Don't play their game.

But the host should be one of the best for rust servers thats why im a bit confused.

So anyway, where are you guys' crash logs stored?

"should be one of the best"... that just means they have good marketing though doesn't it - they've made you believe they're the best, but that doesn't make it so.

To me this seems more like a network outage rather than server issue, but I'm only guessing - in this case there would be no logs to see. Whatever the case may be, I still think you should trust your instincts. When the service you're receiving is not acceptable and the host is unable or unwilling to resolve the issue, it's time to move on.

As for the server crash logs, Wulf has already given you the best answer you'll get here.