what use is a crash dump?  I just bagged one (it struggled mightily, but I
was too much for it in the end :) and am wondering if I can investigate it
to find why & where it happened  (or should I just let it go?)

actually, it did tell me something as it was crashing:

panic: ufs_direnter2: compact2

is that of any use to anybody?  I am running a current (early dec) kernel and
world etc..  I was trying to recompile X11R6 as I thought it might be a nice
idea, but since I don't have space for everything, I mounted the CD as
/cdrom, and did a union mount to get everything into the right place and let
me modify the source tree..  started patching, and panic soon after. 

I don't know if this points to union or ffs, though I did induce a crash with
union last week (deleted a directory in the union filesystem, while another
sleeping user was inside that directory - it worked ok until I awoke the
other user)

]ain