Hrmm, wondering if anyone can suggest anything here... I don't know how to troubleshoot Linux, what with me being a Windows emigrant and having lived in the Windows world for years upon years, while only a few months in Linux. I'm running Redhat 7.3 and it's the firewall for the rest of my network. Everything will work fine until a few hours after I started it up, when one of my users reports that the internet is "going slow" and things are timing out on them. I check it out on my end, things are slow too. In addition to that, I can't start any new processes (!) -- I can't even shut the sys down cleanly by using the menus or by switching to a different terminal and logging in to reboot. I've tried killing X, to close down all the processes launched within it, in case I did something funky, but killing X just gives me a blank screen, no terminal prompt or anything. I have to reboot, and when I do, my internet connection is speedy once again, my users are happy, and I can launch new processes.... until it happens again, a few hours later.

I have no idea how to troubleshoot this, anybody have any suggestions? Thanks.