Server hanging

[Darío Mariani <dmarian fi uba ar>]

Hello:
  I'm administering a server with RedHat 7.3 installed, it runs the 
mail server (pop, imap and webmail), web server, and two or three minor 
services. It has an Athlon running an 1.3 GHz, 512 MB of DDR, and two 
SCSI disk running at 80 MHz in RAID 0 by software. The load average in 
the order of 2 to 3 is quite common.

  The problem is that it hangs more or less once a week and our 
internal discussions are escalating to physical agression in two or 
three days :-). What is puzzling us is that it doesn't tell anything on 
what is happening, but it seems that it stops reading the disk and the 
kernel doesn't panic, as it answers pings and once I was logged in 
remotely and was able to type commands (of course, when I hit enter 
nothing happened).

 The filesystem is ext3 and the kernel is 2.4.20 release 13.8, but also 
happened with 2.4.18 rel 3.

  I should add that because of a misconfiguration it was running the 
SCSI bus at 40 MHz, when we corrected it and went to 80 MHz the hangups 
dropped, it was hanging twice or more a week. The cables and termination 
were replaced, as part of one of our tests.

  Another thing, the general consensus here is that the problem is that 
we are using RedHat and we should use XXXX, which I do not agree, after 
all basically it's all the same software. Does anyone know of 
documentation I can use to support or drop my argument, besides a 
distribution comparison?

  Well, any ideas to avoid the bloodshed will be apreciated. Thanks,

            Darío