cron and vfork

[Chuck Swiger]

Malcolm Kay wrote:
[ ... ]
> The presence of a problem became evident when when I was 
> unable to log into the machine Monday morning, neither from
> a console or through ssh on the LAN. At the console it puts up
> a login prompt and accepts the name entry but that is all --
> no password prompt and no further activity. I've had to reboot
> the machine with a brutal physical reset.

Your description sounds somewhat like the machine ran out of virtual memory, 
or possibly some other critical resource like process table slots.  Run top 
continuously for a few days and see what you see, or consider fancier 
monitoring capabilities from ports.

-- 
-Chuck