Server overloaded? Or is it a bug?

[Pete French]

> It asked me for the password, and then hanged. I guess it's something with the
> processes, but the kern.maxproc sysctl is set to 4068, and I never have so 
> many processes.

Ahhh... I've seen a server do that several times. In my case it was
because a disc had locked up. So the machine runs fine, but anything
which needs to access that disc would freeze - loginswouldnt work, the
webserver would only serrve cached pages. Due to the fact BSD caches so
much and does such a good job of it then it appears large chunks of the machine
were running fine.

In my case it turned out to be a wrongly configures SCSI bus (as shipped by
Compaq!)

-pcf.