Our work server seems to enjoy crashing (at the moment) about once a day – but when I go to look at the console I can’t see anything because the screen has dimmed to black – and as the computer has locked up, I can’t wake the screen up to see if there is a useful kernel panic message.
It turns out my answer lies with /etc/console-tools/config – as this is Debian Squeeze.
See http://serverfault.com/questions/137728/how-do-i-permanently-disable-linuxs-console-screen-saver-system-wide
Next up, I just needed to stop it from dimming the console font – adding this to /etc/rc.local seems to help :
setterm -half-bright off