Saw a strange problem the other day with my Linux machine. First, here's a description of my setup...

I have a Linksys wireless router in my living room connected to my cable modem. Connected to this router is a "wired" SB2.

In my bedroom I have a wireless SB2 networked to the wireless router in the living room. Also in my bedroom I have a 1.2Ghz PC (512 Mb of ram)running Red Hat ver 9.0. This machine is using the wireless SB2 as a bridge to the network(thru a crossover cable). Currently I have the SB's in both rooms synched.

The other day I started playing some music from an internet radio station and went into the living room to read a book. An hour or so later I go back into my bedroom and found the Linux box going "nuts". I could hear that the harddrive was reading/writing something like gangbusters. There weren't any user applications running on the desktop. The only services that would be running would have been Red Hat defaults with the exception of slimserver. Moving the mouse only resulted in staggered movement of the cursor on the screen and I couldn't get anything on the desktop to respond to mouse clicks or even a Ctrl Alt Delete. Had to hit the Reset button to get things back to normal.

Any ideas what might have been going on? I'm not very familiar with Linux. I installed this version of Red Hat on this machine about a year ago but haven't really fooled with it until just recently. If I had to guess, I'd say that something had ate up most of my usable memory and Linux had started using the harddisk as virtual memory for stuff running in the background.

I'm really not a linux guy so if you guys have any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this if it happens again i'd really appreciate it.