Help diagnosing wierd lockup problem
 

I have this problem with a little server that I made from redhat to debian. On redhat I never had a problem with it and it just kept chucking along for years. On debian I can sort of 'overload' it and make it die. Headless/no-X dual PII333 with 256mb ram on a BX chipset running 2.6.8-smp/sarge

For instance I just tried to refresh the locate database and bye bye. I can no longer read or write from the hard drive. All I can do to describe it is one experience I seem to remember when I filled a hard drive up on another linux system on accident and the whole thing is still running but it cannot do anything because it says everything is 'read only' or 'cannot find' or 'segment fault'... aka it isn't accessing the hard drive anymore.

This system has 5 paritions, all are below 50%. The tmp partition is 15mb which if that is the case, maybe that is the problem even though I think 512 mb swap would cover that. I never actually intended using this thing for anything really, just a circumstancial temporary thing. But I can't really tell what is going on because it can't log the errors and right now I am hundreds of miles away from it.

It never actually has problems when I am around it, because that is life isn't it? Only when the worst possible time for it to do this will it experience this problem. If anybody has 'any' idea as to what this could be I'd love to hear it. I tried to monitor the drive a number of different ways but everything is always clean and normal up until I leave and drive hundreds of miles away. Once it is rebooted everything is fine with it.

I think it has to be hardware, but if anybody notices something please tell me.

(P.S. I know this is a bit vauge... It's vauge to me too when I don't have my logs)