Dan Hunt wrote:
Here are the symptoms. Debian Stable with 2.4 kernel becomes unresponsive. Uptime average is only one or two hours. I have also had the same symptoms with a knoppix 3.2 boot disk. I think it even happened with out the X-window system running. Nothing but pulling the power cord out of the back of the power supply will break out of this freeze or crash. This has to be hardware related, right?
Almost certainly.
How do to identify the problem area? Tests to run, log file to read?
Heat. Cool your box; see if the problem goes away.Memory. apt-get install memtest86 and run it. Better, swap around or remove or replace memory sticks and see if the problem goes away.