[plug] Weird Linux Problems

[Tim White]

I'm trying to remotely diagnose a linux machine that is having some odd 
problems. Things like top and ps just hang part way through a listing. 
Trying to do dmesg to the terminal hangs, but dmesg to a file doesn't.

It's recently had a memory upgrade from 1Gb to 4Gb, so eventually I want 
to run memtest on it (but being remote, can't do that atm). It's running 
Ubuntu 11.10.

I'm guessing it must be some hardware driver issue, but can't work out 
which one yet (lsmod even hangs).

The last odd thing that happened, is a dns lookup returned the ip 
address in reverse! But this I believe was the adsl modem doing it, 
anyone heard of that happening? (Lookup for purewhite.id.au returned 
10.45.41.175 instead of 175.41.45.10)

Any hints on what might be causing these hangs?

Tim