A followup on my hang of the system logs and not being able to "su"...

I checked all the logs.  /var/log/xferlog, /var/log/messages, /var/log/authlog,
/var/cron/log all "stopped" at about 11:30 AM on the 17th.  Whatever
happened affected all of them.

Also, after my reboot at 6 this morning, the machine stopped responding at
7:05 AM.  I could still ping the machine, and network connections could be
started (as in telnet would yield the "connected to...") but no login
prompt.   The web server gave the same.  Connections established, but no
data could be passed.

Possibly coincidentally, this second hang happened about the time that I
did a "quit" on the Z-term session that I had been using to access the serial
console on the machine.

My theory is that the somewhat broken serial on the machine was blocking
syslog because syslogd was trying to write to /dev/console.  Everything that
generated a console message (like su) would eventually hang because of
this blockage.

Has anyone else seen anything like this?  Any opinions?

My personal feeling is that I am being punished for not fixing the serial
driver. ;->

-dgl-