---In message <20021108102053.GA19929@nailbunny.tenten>
>
>Just wondered if anyone has seen this before -
>a bit long winded so the summary is:

A few questions:

Does the machine respond to ping from the LAN?

What happens if you send a BREAK (in tip this is ~#) to the console?
 (Do you get an "ok" prompt?)

It might be worth it to write a quick shell script that checks various
Useful Things about the machine, and call it from cron every 1-5
minutes. For example, do a "ps wwwaxl" listing, interfaces, vmstat, etc.

 I have seen machines become just about completely unresponsive after
being swamped by runaway processes.  (For example, a program than
continuously spawns children that consume CPU).

 --johan