1. Golly, you missed your chance to set up a blue-ribbon panel, buy a new office building, ask for a billion dollars in taxpayers' money to conduct studies, and hold press conferences on how you're going to make sure this never happens again. Tsk tsk :)

Posted by: Burdabee on July 29, 2005 05:12 PM

2. If you had one, you'll have another.

Look at hardware; you have something overheating, going bad or otherwise expiring.

(Linux user/admin since '93)

Posted by: Gary on July 29, 2005 05:25 PM

3. A "Kernel Panic"?

I had one of those. I was cooking microwave popcorn I hit 30 min instead of 3 min. It caused quite a stinking panic!

Seriously though, was it a DDoS attack or a system failure? My machine has been acting somewhat peculiar lately. Nothing I can pinpoint as of yet.

I think its about time for a new and improved virus to hit the Web. We haven't had a good grid crash in a while. Keep your guard up folks, and BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!

Posted by: Splatter on July 29, 2005 05:35 PM

4. Oh my goodness! A kernel panic. The worse I've had is kernel anxiety.

Posted by: BJ Gadfly on July 29, 2005 05:36 PM

5. Gary, you are probably right, "overheating".

I have heard from several people that their electronics are going away (TV, PC, etc.) lately. Like us WA people, our machines are not used to the heat. That is why I run an extra fan on my system.

Posted by: Splatter on July 29, 2005 05:42 PM

6. A Kernel Panic? Sounds even worse than a Major Panic, but not quite as bad as a General Panic. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Posted by: TB on July 29, 2005 06:22 PM

7. UNIX / Linux are by far and away the most stable platforms, but every once in a long while, they do crash. Probably either hardware or a memory leak. Case in point, as I type this on my laptop which is a PowerBook running Mac OS 10.4.2, a derivative of BSD UNIX, my uptime is 16 Days and 3 Hours, and that's a laptop, and the only reason I rebooted before was to install the latest version of the OS. Rock solid. In the past, I've managed key enterprise servers running Solaris, Linux and other UNIX derivatives with 400 or more straight days of uptime. With UNIX, more often than not, the reason you have to shut it down is external such as UPS maintenance, other yearly facility maintenance, power outage, new version of the OS, etc.

Of course your server could also have been defending itself against a particularly offensive troll comment. ;-)

Posted by: Jeff B. on July 29, 2005 08:06 PM

8. In these technical matters...I choose to remain blissfully ignorant! heh....
(so don't tell me what Kernel Panic means...I'd rather use my imagination! ;)

Posted by: Deborah on July 29, 2005 09:43 PM

9. I have had sex, therefore I do not use Linux.

Posted by: Cryptometaphor on July 30, 2005 09:51 AM

10. Shark, check to see if you are running out of swap space, disk space, or the dreaded "memory leak".

Yeah, the heat could most definitely be a problem. MORE FANS!

Do an fsck every week or so just to keep the filesystem clean, and check for OS updates every two weeks or so. Wouldn't hurt to df the file structure every so often, either. Linux is a helluva lot more forgiving than WinDoze, but running out of disk space or memory will cause a barf, errrrr, Kernel Panic.

Check the heat of your hard disks by touching the metal case. If you are almost burning your fingers, they're WAY too hot - move more air around them.

Keep up the good work!

Igor

(Hardware geek since 1968, *nix user since AT&T's System 3 came out. Hollerith 80-column punch cards, 7-track (550 BPI) tape, and all that. The systems were steam powered back then, ya know... ;p )

Posted by: Igor on July 30, 2005 07:31 PM

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