[CentOS] System hangs silently

Wed Jan 18 19:38:38 UTC 2006
Fong Vang <sudoyang at gmail.com>

I have a total of 20 CentOS 4.1 systems running on fairly new
hardware.  About 6 of them are experiencing strange hangs without any
indication -- nothing in /var/log/messages nor on the console --
sometime within 10-30 minutes after a reboot.  The systems still
responds to ping but you can't ssh to it.  At the console, you could
type "root" at the user prompt but it hangs immediately after hitting
enter.

Memory scan of all systems show no error.

Any idea how to troubleshoot this problem.  The system's not
responsive to do any troubleshooting and nothing abnormal is in the
log.

We running htis kernel: kernel-smp-2.6.9-11.EL.i686.rpm.

Thanks for any help.