[ale] indecipherable hard crash

[joshy]

Anyone know if it's possible for a JVM to hard crash a linux box?

The story:

I have an AMD 700 mhz box with standard components that I've
been using on and off for about 2 years.  I recently refreshed
the box with RH7.3 and colo'ed it on a friends DSL line to
use a my permanent webserver.  It's had a few problems recovering
from power outages but now it's on a UPS line and everything
seems to be fine.   

Last weekend I bought 2 256MB DIMMS to add to the 128MB already
in the box.  Since then the box runs fine when just using Apache,
but whenever I startup Tomcat to start using my java servlets the 
box dies.  No entries in the syslog, no kernel panics, it just stops.
I actually saw it die in front of me when I was testing the servlets
on my laptop.  I had a top process going which froze and then the
video signal appeared to stop. The monitor when into power save
mode.  This behavior is pretty consistent. It happens right
after I start tomcat and start loading some pages.  Given that
Tomcat runs on the JVM which is a normal user level process, I don't
understand how this can happen. 

At this point I can only assume that either the memory is bad
or misconfigured some how. Still, I would have expected to see
more errors printed somewhere.

Any ideas?
Thanks,

- Joshua


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