CentOS - Nov 2007 - Kernel panic - where to go from here?

CentOS 5 has been running continuously since 9/21 on my "do
everything" home
server (with the exception of a kernel update).  It's a fairly old Athlon
machine that serves as a firewall and various servers (dovecot, samba, NFS,
dhcp, OpenVPN, etc).

I connected via OpenVPN about a week ago and discovered I get a kernel panic.
I've since found that this is very repeatable and happens only after being 
connected via OpenVPN for about 4 hours or so.

I was able to manually copy the stuff on the console after the panic (see
below).
I googled "unable to handle kernel paging request" and didn't
really find
anything useful (to me).

I've tried both kernel version 2.6.18-8.1.14.el5 and 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5 as
well
as OpenVPN versions 2.1_rc4-1 and 2.0.9 all with the same results.

Not sure where to go with this(?).  Should I post this on a kernel mailing
list?  Or somewhere else?



Call Trace:
   [<C040502c>] dump_trace+0x8c/0x96
   [<c0405046>] show_trace_log_lvl+0x10/0x20
   [<c04050e2>] show_stack_log_lvl+0x8c/0x94
   [<c040520f>] show_registers+0x125/0x191
   [<c0404c3b>] kernel_thread_helper+0x7/0x10
   [<c0405411>] die+0x196/0x296
   [<c05fd73f>] do_page_fault+0x3ea/0x4b8
   [<c0434d15>] kthread+0x0/0xeb
   [<c05fd355>] do_page_fault+0x0/0x4b8
   [<c0404a71>] error_code+0x39/0x40
   [<c0434d15>] kthread+0x0/0xeb
   [<c0404c3b>] kernel_thread_helper+0x7/0x10
BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address c0613dbf
Printing eip:
   c0404c44
   *pde = 2f9b5163
Recursive die() failure, output suppressed
   <0>Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception


-- Thanks, Mike

On Nov 28, 2007 11:27 AM, Mike <azmr at earthlink.net>
wrote:
> I googled "unable to handle kernel paging request" and didn't
really find
> anything useful (to me).
In my experience this probably means that you have some RAM going bad
and you only manage to tickle the problem when the machine becomes
loaded enough to need that part of the address space.

Reboot with memtest86 (should be on the centos install media) and look
for test failures.