My linux box freezes intermitently. the strange thing is this only happens at night (after i knock off). and when someone resets it, it doesnt stay up for more than an hour. when reset in the morning, it stays up the whole day. it has been ok all along (the past year) The only thing i did recently is install webmin but uninstalling it doesnt solve the problem. Could it be someone is hacking me? if so how do i know. is there a log i can check to see what happens just before the freeze. in /var/log/messeges i can only see the time it froze and no much info. any ideas? my only guess is Murphy's Law, but unfortunately my boss dont believe in Murphy.

I would start checking for system overheat first. If you don't think that's what it is, I'd check for the memories sticks. Some may gone bad. If that's not what it is, then I dunno. But I bet it's hardware related

its just a guess also but maybe some job starts at night

u could check the cron jobs

It probably cron jobs as suggested by heema. I found that one of my systems crawled during the night and there was a lot of hard drive activity almost at 1am every night. I thought I had got hacked until I checked the logs and discovered that the system ran cron jobs every night at 1am.

I have just transfered the harddisk into another box with the exact config. lets c wat happens tonite.

I'd suspect the culprit may be an errant 3D screensaver.

--jeremy

it was a hardware problem.