server unresponsive after several days

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 04:52:21PM -0400, cleger at scs.carleton.ca wrote:
> Greetings list, 
> 
> I have a server that serves (pun inevitable) as storage array on my network.
> This machine works fine, except for the strange fact that, a few days after
> booting up, the machine, while still on, stops responding to pings, to keyboard
> input, to ssh requests, and anything else I can throw at it. 
> 
> Would anyone like to suggest a troubleshooting approach to this? Has anyone
> heard of any such thing happening? The OS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release
> 4 (Nahant Update 3). Is this, in your experience, more likely to happen due to
> the hardware being wonky, or the OS having some bug? 
> 
> Thanks in advance, 

While there certainly could be a number of things causing this problem, the
first thing you should do is update your system with the latest errata.
Update 4 has been out for a long while and there are updates beyond that
available as well.

If the problem still occurs when you're running all the "latest" software, you
can then begin troubleshooting elsewhere.

No sense in spending hours swapping out hardware or tinkering with
configurations when a newer kernel woulda fixed the issue :)

Ray