Funny kernel antics

[Robert Ruzbacky <robr@mikka.net.au>]

Hi!

On my Internet server (running potato and kernel 2.2.19pre), I got a funny 
thing happening.  The kernel started to spit out errors on the console.  I 
can't reproduce them, but they are the CPU dump of registers that you get 
when unix normally crashes and then halts the machine.  I kept getting this 
dump, then I tried to shut down the machine, but couldn't.  It was dumping 
on qmail and apache processes and just causing havoc, although I could 
still ping the outside world.  I had to press the reset button to get out 
of this situation. Luckily the machine came up ok.

Some symptoms include:

	(a) I can't log in properly in the first console screen, but after Alt-F2 
to the second screen, I can get in ok
	(b) I have had the machine hang with the screen being blank..had to press 
reset...this happens once every two
	     weeks.  Logs don't show up any errors.

I had upgraded from the bo distribution to potato and suspect it must have 
been something done during the upgrade, as I updated heaps of packages. 
 Previously, running on bo was very stable..hardly had a crash at all

Anyone know what causes this or seen this happen before?

I will probably install a fresh copy of potato on another hard disk and do 
the config again, just as a backup :-)

Rob...