i dont know when this behaviour occured, and i dont know why it is happening.
but i noticed that, when starting netscape, or, as just some minutes
ago, hitting ctrl-alt-backspace to terminate X, caused our machine to
hang - (chant: hitting the num-lock key would not make the num-lock LED
flash).
all i can see is that the HDD led, which I connected to the SCSI adapter,
is constantly lit.
even pushing the reset button will not make this constantly-lit-LED
go away, and, when re-booting the machine, the kernel will not find the
SCSI adapter anymore.
all that helps here is pushing the power button.
now for the hardware:
P90 , 32MB real, 40MB swap
ASUS ?P?55XPE w/ 512KB burst cache
1 x IDE 120MB root drive (quantum)
6 SCSI drives, various manufacturers (dec, quantum, cfp1060s, cfp1080s)
aha1542cf scsi host adapter
unfortunately (and kinda obvious, since writing to HDD seems to be dis-
functional at that time) there is nothing in the logfiles.
I'm beginning to suspect a hardware problem ... broken SCSI drive, maybe ?
dunno !
/herp