how to get more verbose messages

[Reuben D. Budiardja]

Hi all,
I am having problem with server locks up during heavy rsync. I am trying to 
rsync abou 40GB of data (/home directory from some remote machine), and this 
is the 3 third times in a day the server just suddenly locks up in the middle 
of rsync. Only cold reboot work. The server run software RAID 5.

So I'm wondering if there's a way of getting more verbose messages of what's 
happening with the machine. 

I know the possibilities are flaky hardware, but there's nothing in 
/var/log/messages when this happened. I'm planning on running memtest86 on 
it, but other than that, I would appreciate any suggestion anyone can give to 
start troubleshooting this.

Thanks in advance for any help.
RDB
-- 
Reuben D. Budiardja
Department of Physics and Astronomy
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
---------------------------------------------------------
"To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy 
something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy 
Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional 
side effect."
                 - Linus Torvalds -