I happen to see our machine simply blocking recently (I installed 67 yester-
day). Symptoms are a black screen, and a num-lock LED that does not flash
on/off when pressing the num-lock key.
since "Don't Run Out Of Swap"(TM) still seems to be a valid restriction in
the kernel, and these symptoms look like an out-of-swap-box, I guess that's
the reason for the hang.
however, I'm using 32MB real and 40MB swap (I dedicated an old SCSI disk
for swapping, so it's a swap-drive, not a swap-partition :-), thus running
out of swap should be kind of difficult. could this point to a memory
leakage ?
another problem: since the machine is a network server and is left alone
most of the time, I changed setterm to "/bin/setterm -blank 0"
in rc.M, no screen blanking at all, but turn off the power of the monitor
instead. but when the machine is down, turning the power on again will
not make the screen display the last screen-contenst. why is that ? one
possible explanation would be that the screen is all filled with 0x20,
but I don't really believe that's the solution.
/herp