[Techtalk] machine hanging

[B Seeger]

Howdy, 

I have a machine in the lab that loves to hang when I either try scp
something off of it or plug in a USB stick, or do something intense like
tell it to rotate the logs. 

>From what I can figure out, the OS (linux 2.4.31 - debian) is taking up
95% of it's partition's space and the logs grow unchecked (though not
fast enough to really cause _the_ problem).  I suspect that the
partition being almost full is the essence of my problem... 

Other then getting the logs to roll and get back some space, does anyone
have any ideas of what else I could check? 

Some stats:

df -h:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             989M  891M   48M  95% /
tmpfs                 442M     0  442M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3              67G   11G   53G  18% /data0


Honestly, I don't know what tempfs is... (I just inherited this project
after it was sitting still for a year or so...)


cat /proc/meminfo:
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  926068736 134758400 791310336        0  5095424  7708672
Swap: 320774144        0 320774144
MemTotal:       904364 kB
MemFree:        772764 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:          4976 kB
Cached:           7528 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:           9536 kB
Inactive:         3028 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       904364 kB
LowFree:        772764 kB
SwapTotal:      313256 kB
SwapFree:       313256 kB
 

My guess is that anything intense is overburdening this machine and
locking it up (I have to do a hard reboot).  I'm not sure how to solve
this problem, short of a re-install or freeing up some space.  Can I
repartition it w/ out a re-installing?  Don't think so, but worth
asking...

I didn't originally configure this machine and I thought it was running
fine until I asked it to do something more substantial then "ls" or
"du". 

Sigh... any advice? 

-Bethany