I came back after the holiday to find that my server- Dell Precision 380 desktop with Redhat Enterprise V4- had shutdown uncleanly. Very uncleanly. (we had storms pass throught the area).
PROBLEM: The machine is super S....L....O....W. Serving a file (via Samba) takes about 1-2 minutes. Even bringing up Gnome takes a total of 2-3 minutes.
Also- I try to open a log file- it times out without opening, but when I shut the machine down it always open the file I was looking for just before it shuts down.
Is this a problem with X???
Also system clock is out of sync(!). Logs show events happening 8 hours ahead of current time as displayed on desktop.

Thanks a million!

OK- so after a couple of hopeful reboots, no improvement, but I leave the office and come back this morning and lo and behold- it's fixed. Everything back to normal. Don't know why it broke, don't know why it fixed. Maybe next time instead of building a new server and frantically backing up files and searching the web for answers I'll just turn the lights out and go have a nice lunch. Strange.

Sure sounds like it might have been a network issue.
Everything you mentioned relies on the network being up to snuff. The outage might have messed it up also. I'm guessing you have a NTP server for your time sync ....otherwise that would not be a network glitch.

Thanks for the reply DotHQ...I don't know, but it could very well be a networking issue(although I did check all the usual network stuff- maybe something I missed). I have wireshark but not experienced at reading the reports, so not sure how to diagnose weird stuff. Anyhow, about the time I posted my overly happy "it fixed itself" follow-up, things went back to sludge slow...I went aroung making apologies to everyone,frantically re-booted the back up in preparation to swap...etc. I check this morning (prior to actually putting the back up online) and guess what....all systems go, no problems....I give up!!!!Maybe it was the Linux gods reminding me not to be too smug about my MS-less systems.

Hey,

Just out of curiosity, have you tried reseating your RAM? It could possibly be holding a negative charge. It wouldn't hurt to try it. Secondly, check how many processes are running at the time of shut down, that could prevent it from shutting down as fast as it normally could.

Regards,

Brandon