[TriLUG] How would you diagnose "random" system hangs?

[Andrew Perrin]

My home system has been freezing up at apparently random times -- usually 
when I'm at work, so I come home to a frozen machine that has to be 
cold-booted. How would you go about checking this out? I've let memtest86 
run continuously for 24 hours with no errors, so I don't think it's 
memory. I have the sensors reporting hourly to a log, and there are no 
temperature concerns (generally between 37 and 40C). There's nothing of 
interest in syslog that rings any bells to me. Any ideas?

The machine is an ASUS A8N-E, nForce chipset, with an Athlon64 dual-core 
CPU and 4GB of RAM in it. It's running debian etch, but with a 
home-compiled kernel 2.6.20.7.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu - http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu
Assistant Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_
University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
New Book: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/178592.ctl