Computer and networking hardware can go bad in all kinds of ways. Sometimes it's obvious what the problem is, and sometimes it isn't. We recently had one of our machines lock up, apparently due to an issue with the storage subsystem. FWIW, The machine in question uses a 3ware IDE RAID controller with half a dozen drives hooked up to it. (We had a bunch of old 120GB drives lying around - six of them configured as a RAID-5 array (with one as a hot spare) was a super-economical way to get almost half a terabyte of somewhat reliable storage, alhough 0.5TB isn't much these days. Anyways... the problem was proving hard to diagnose, since it was intermittent, and manifested itself in different ways - kernel panics... refusing to boot... booting then locking up after variable periods of time.
At one point, we pulled the drives with the aim of re-seating the cables, and a sharp-eyed staff member noticed... well, see if you can spot the problem. Drive removed, all seems to be well. Dry join? Metal fatigue from years of fan and drive vibration? Who knows.
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