[Sheflug] random crashes - how to prepare bug report?

[xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hi,

My linux machine is crashing randomly once every couple of days - it
freezes up and will not respond to anything (including ctrl-alt-del,
or ping from another machine) except the on/off switch.  The load on
the machine is light, and the work it is doing is not particularly
unusual. 

(1) Can anyone suggest how I could gather useful information about what is
    going on?  

  I put a line like this in /etc/syslog.conf:

  *.debug;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none  /var/log/messages

  As far as I understand it, this should get all possible debugging
  information out of syslogd, although I'm not completely clear whether
  any more could be squeezed out of klogd.  In any case, I'm not getting
  any messages around the time of a crash.  I've also turned on all the
  logging options that I can find in the processes that I am running,
  without any helpful effect.

(2) If I can get any usable information about the problem, does anyone
    know where I should send it?  

  If I knew that it was a kernel problem, I'd try the linux-kernel
  mailing list.  But that looks pretty intimidating, so I'd want to be
  sure I knew what I was talking about first!  Also, I guess that some
  kind of hardware problem is more likely.

I'm using Red Hat 7.2, which includes the 2.4.7-10 kernel, on a
machine with an Intel Pentium 4 CPU running at 1.5 GHz and 512M of
RAM.  Crashes occur even when I am not running X and no users are
logged on.  The main process that I am running is the Jakarta Tomcat
web server, which runs a Java servlet, which runs the symbolic
mathematics program Maple as an external process.  As far as I can
tell from the logs, when the last crash occurred, there had been no
request to the web server for some time.  It's just possible that a
request triggered the crash, which prevented the request from being
logged, but I doubt it.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Neil Strickland

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