Any IBM x226 Users?

["Barry L. Kline" <blkline attglobal net>]

I got a call from a colleague who is having troubles with his IBM x226 
(8648-2BU) server and RHEL 3.  The box has one processor (with 
hyperthreading), 1.5 GB of RAM, and the IBM ServerRAID controller with 72Gb 
SCSI drives in a RAID 1 configuration.  He uses this box primarily as a Samba 
PDC, DHCP server and intranet DNS server.

The problem is that the machine occasionally appears to lock up.  Not always a 
solid lockup, though.  The most recent occurance was interesting... the owner 
of said box has his XP laptop connect to four different Samba shares.  He 
noticed the problem when attempting to access one of the shares -- three were 
not connected but one was.  

He could ping the machine.

At the x226 console the keyboard was unresponsive and there was nothing on the 
CRT to indicate a problem.  His only recourse was to power-cycle the box and 
await the next instance of failure.

Things that have been checked:

All fans are spinning and the box resides in a temperature controlled 
environment at a (computer) temperate 68 degrees.  The box is on a 
good-quality UPS.  

The logs show nothing remarkable.

The partitions are at most 12% used.

All applicable RHEL patches are installed.

In short, everything seems to be just fine.   I can't decide if this is 
hardware or software.

I wanted to put some hardware monitoring into play but can't seem to figure 
out what IBM offers along those lines.  The lm_sensors package (and 
kernel-smp-unsupported) can't find any hardware sensors to report on, so 
that's out.

The box was put into production two weeks ago, having replaced a Pentium III 
500 Mhz, 128Mb, 9G SCSI RH 6.1 box that had been running flawlessly for 1556 
days of uptime.  Obviously, this server-class box should perform at least as 
well as the workstation-class machine did.


So here are my questions:

1)  Is anyone out there using this machine with success?
2) Can anyone point me to the appropriate IBM (or other) Linux hardware 
monitoring software?
3) Any suggestions in which direction to go?

TIA,

Barry