RHEL4 System Crash: Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address

[Jim Nelson]

Shane Presley wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I had a RHEL4 system crash a day or two ago.  First RedHat system that
> I've ever seen completely hung, requiring me to hard power cycle it.
> Felt like my Windows days.  But then it happened yesterday as well.
> So something is wrong with this server.
> 
> It's fully patched (up2date), and is a Dell 2850.  I captured the
> /var/log/messages right before it panicked and here's the logs:
> 

<snip>

> 
> So I'm not sure what to make of that.  I noticed one process name in
> there (bbtest-net) which is part of my BigBrother monitoring system.
> But that's been running OK for years, and hasn't been changed
> recently.  Not sure where else to look.  Could this be a hardware
> (memory?) problem?
> 
> Shane
> 

Another thing that I've run into is overheating - we had a PE1800 that would go 
out to lunch at 4 AM on a semi-regular basis - turned out that the cooling was 
inadequate in the server room, and a late-night batch processing job on another 
machine overheated the room.  It would throw completely random kernel panics, 
but dropping a spot cooler in front of the rack stabilized it.

Don't know if that's the case, but it took setting up a temperature monitor in 
the room to catch it...