I have ahad a mysterious problem on my mandrake linux (10 RC1) server. It has been working fine since christmas then on saturday (19th june) it crashed. this is the first time since christmas it has crashed. I have two other servers which are fine. This server is an aging k6/2 400 with 96mb ram. (my other servers are pentium 266's with 89mb ram and 128mb ram). The server is my email server hosting Qmail and apache with squirelmail. it also is my dns server (BIND 9.2xx). after it crashed i checked my kernel logs. in the kernel.errors log was a list of "out of memory" errors here is an extract:

"Jun 19 10:53:18 mars kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 24854 (tcpserver).
Jun 19 10:53:24 mars kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 24843 (qmail-send)."

I do not under stand why it has sudenly started to runn out or ram. On one of the times over the weekend when it hadn't crashed it ran a "ps aux" and found that spam assassin was using up 25% of my ram so i stoped it however later that day it crashed. also after another rebot i periodical ran "free -m" and found that when i used the webmail it would report 1mb free then 10 mins later still 1mb free. The server didn't seem to free up the ram after about 30mins it would free up another mb but this seemed very odd

I do not know wether this is a hardware error or a software error

I have installed for ram now and it is still crashing could it be the graphics card

Well, those out of memory errors are created by the kernel's OOM killer -- it randomly chooses processes to kill when the system starts running dangerously low on memory (it may not be totally random, there are probably some heuristics involved, I'm not too sure). You mentioned that spam-assassin was using up a lot of memory. Just guessing here, but perhaps it has a memory leak (doubtful or many others would be noticing it) or there's a lot of unprocessed mail in qmail's delivery queue?

As for the 1MB free, I've got 1GB of RAM in my machine and it shows 3MB free. A lot of that is being used to cache data, though (700+ MB). I'd suggest running top and when it's running type s1 (1 second refreshes) then On<ENTER> (sort display by memory usage). See what processes are using up RAM and go from there.

--mascdman