[lug] Daily system crash....

[David Morris]

I have a strange problem with my system I'm hoping for input
on.

I run Debian Testing (lenny) 64-bit (AMD64).  After a recent
update to the latest version of available packages my system
started crashing once a day.

The crash is a complete system lockup.  No response locally
or when I attempt to ssh in from a remote computer.  System
logs contain no indication of the cause of the problem.  At
the time of the crash I have always been actively using the
system (not surprising given I work from home), however I
was only typing at the time.  The only other processes
running are XMMS, Pidgin, VIM editors, ssh sessions, and
sometimes a few with 'tail -f' running on them.  At every
crash I have been typing in a VIM editor in a terminal
window (mrxvt) either on a local or remote system, but then
I do that constantly throughout the day.

Ordinarily I would suspect a hardware problem (Motherboard,
CPU, or RAM), however two things lead me to believe this
might not be the case:

- The first instance was a few hours after a big update of
  Debian packages.
- Not reproducible on demand, but randomly once every 12-36
  hours which usually indicates a software problem.

I plan to run memtest86, however this will need to wait
until tonight.

Any suggestions on how I might glean more insight into the
cause of the problem given nothing shows up in the syslog?

--David