From the events as they happened....
The Vern server was acting strange and dropping its network connection on a regular basis. It was decided the next time this happened, since the server would be offline anyways, to go ahead and replace the Nic card because this is where we believed the problems to be stemming from.
After replacing the nic card the sever came back up for a few minutes, the one-site tech said he had trouble getting it to boot, and that he felt the motherboard had some problems with the messages he saw on screen. and was probably the real problem with this unit.
We are having them replace the motherboard and all ram now to get it fixed, and if that doesn't work the next step is to put the drives in a new server.