Hello all,

I have a completely new system, with a completely new OS installed. The uptime for this new system is abysmal - anywhere from 30 minutes to 8 hours, and then she dries up and blows away. Any suggestions on where to start looking for answers would be greatly appreciated.

Here are the hardware/OS details:

Asus A8N-SLI mobo
Athlon64 3500+ socket 939
nVidia PX6600TD video card
2 1 gig PC3200 RAM in dual channel configuration
Maxtor 91160M0 SATA drive (OS on this)
Seagate ST3200822A IDE drive
Power supply: Ultra X-Finity 500 watts.
Belkin 1100VA UPS
SuSE 10.1 X86_64 OS with nVidia video driver

Symptoms:

No warning, no indications of increased resource usage. The screen, mouse and keyboard just suddenly stop responding. The screen doesn't go blank - it just freezes in place. I'm assuming that the OS has crashed, because I can no longer SSH into the box when this happens. Immediately after the system freeze, the CPU fan speeds up erraticly. Memtest shows no errors. I dug all through var/log/* but found nothing much interesting, which may mean I don't know what to look for.

Any hints would help. I don't know whether this is a hardware or an OS problem. I suppose I should boot to Win2K for the next few days and see if the same problem occurs there.

Hmm... It's happened twice now at 11:22pm. This time, I noticed the SATA drive just thrashing away. Just before it happened, I opened ksysguard to see what was going on. ksysguard showed no processes using more than 5% cpu - however, the system load charts showed all 2 gig of ram sucked up and the processor pegged.

cron.daily? beagle? Maybe updatedb?