[KLUG Members] help with lockup problem on debian sarge

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> The last two days at different times (3am Sun and 6am Mon) my sarge
> email server has just gone unresponsive. No video, ssh, anything. For
> all purposes the machine is off, but it is still powered. I cannot seem
> to find any reason in the logs for it. All appears well and then nothing
> reported until a hard reboot. 

Do you have syslog marking enabled?  Do you see any messages after the
last mark?

> I checked and saw that there were courier updates that fixed a potential
> DOS. 
> http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/1792/
> What I am wondering is how I can check to see if this was causing the
> problem I'm having. Could these packages I'm running for imap have been
> locking up the machine?

It seems terribly unlikely that a DOS attack against your IMAP server
would leave you without video or an operational console.

Sometimes a handy trick is to setup a dumb terminal on a serial port and
set the kernel to use that as a console.  Then the last kernel messages
are preserved for you to see even if the host flakes out (leaving you
with no video, etc...).  It is pretty simple if you have a spare Wyse or
VT100 around.  Otherwise just a PC with a terminal emulator will work.