> 
> Thus spake Dave Burgess
> > I was building a new machine and only had 8 Meg of memory available.
> > I've built and used dozens of 8M NetBSD machines in the past, so I knew
> > it was possible.
> > 
> > I was working away and the system froze (similar to the way it's
> > described above).
> 
> I'm still having these hangs.  I have another clue.  Out of 3 machines
> running NetBSD 1.3, this is the only one using union mounts.  Is it
> possible that the union mount code is getting messed up and jamming
> the system?  Thinking about it, we recently moved our web page to
> a directory involved in union mounting.  Although the union mounts
> were there all along (and were accessed) this is the first time that
> it would have been hit steadily.  I did test the new pages after
> the switch without problems but perhaps there is something else I
> am missing that has to happen at the same time.
> 
> Or maybe I'm grasping at straws.  :-(

My hang was considerably less challenging than that.  I was running
Apache 1.3 + SSLeay patches and a shopping cart app.  About 2 minutes
after I started the cart app, the system would freeze.  Ping was still
responsive, but the keyboard and screen were toast.

Manuel pointed out that this sounds like the 'running out of VM error'
that's been wrestled with over the past few months.  I fixed mine by
adding another 8Meg of memory.  Everything worked great from then on.


-- 
Dave Burgess                   Network Engineer - Nebraska On-Ramp, Inc.
*bsd FAQ Maintainer / SysAdmin for the NetBSD system in my spare bedroom
"Just because something is stupid doesn't mean there isn't someone that 
doesn't want to do it...."