You certainly notice...

..when your spam scanner stops working. After carrying out some maintenance to my server yesterday I noticed a sudden upsurge of spam arriving in my mailbox. Sure enough a quick check showed that the spam checking daemon spamd wasn't running. A little poking about pointed to behaviour that looked very much like this bug. However after instituting automatic recover with monit the problem seems to have gone away. I suspect the problem may ultimately be my poor little web-server is finally running out of its rather paltry 240Mb of RAM and there may be a rouge OOM on the loose, I haven't yet caught it in the act though. Examining the system did show it was close to the limit although why mysql needs quite so much memory to serve up a couple of megabytes of blog databases is a little beyond me.

Seeing as I couldn't catch another crash I spent the morning mostly creating new signed SSL certificates for my secure websites. Next task on the list is phoning all the utilities and checking what our current credit/debt status is. After that I may give T-Mobile a call about the HTC Hero and making me an offer I can't refuse :-)

UPDATE: Well it seems the kernel upgrade caused it to miss the 1Gb of swap the system usually has. A quick mknod and swapon later and I've quadrupled the available memory. That should do the trick.