I have rented a dedicated server, running Debian stable. Is the startup output that you would see on the screen (if you had one) stored anywhere? If not, is there a non-intrusive way to make that data available after the next reboot? Or how else do you make sure that the system boots up cleanly?
enable bootlogd, which is part of sysvinit-utils by setting
BOOTLOGD_ENABLE=Yes
in/etc/default/bootlogd
which will log in/var/log/boot
. In wheezy and beyond bootlogd is in its own package and will not have/etc/default/bootlogd