Server hiccups

It seems that every few days something goes wrong with the server. Just this morning it died for some unknown reason and I had to get it rebooted. It was still pinging and services such as pop3/ssh/http would connect but then no banners/prompts etc would appear and the service is unresponsive.
Having looked through a number of logfiles, I noticed that just before the crash, there were a lot of failed SSH login attempts from a few different IPs and having seen this before, figured it was about time I did something about them.

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