[plug] How to diagnose a crashing Linux server?

[Ryan]

> One thing I've noticed, however is the memory usage is up reasonably high,
> at 3PM yesterday, following a reboot at around 9am, there was 293Mb of 1.5Gb
> of physical memory in use, with none of the 1.9Gb swap file being used.
> Today at 9.30AM there was 1.4Gb of memory in use, with no swap file being
> used. Currently (3PM today) there is still 1.4Gb of memory in use, the top
> usage programs are nautilus (~14Mb), python (~15Mb), gnome-settings-daemon
> (~12.2Mb), gnome-panel (~10Mb), gnome-system-monitor (~8.5Mb) and httpd
> (~8Mb) ... the total of these seems to be nowhere near the 1.4Gb being
> reported used. This info was collected via System Monitor. 'free' seems to
> indicate roughly the same figures.
> 
> CPU usage seems to have stayed pretty stable at around 1-2%.
> 
> Does this give any more clues??

/me stands on a field and looks left ...

I'm just wondering if you have anything infected with UNIX/RST.[AB] or
anything similiar on the system as I've seen this do some _really_ odd
things to Linux boxes recently, including almost-hard crashing.

Are there any 'defunct' processes listed when you 'ps waux' -
particularly grep processes?   or shell invokations such as 'sh blah
blah blah' that hang around and will not die?

Might be worth running F-Prot >= 3.13 or equivalent over the drive and
seeing what it thinks, just to be sure.

Hopefully I'm completely wrong :)

Ryan