[gentoo-user] Kernel BUG

[David Relson <relson@osagesoftware.com>]

For about a week, my workstation has been crashing every day or so.
Typically it happens late at night while BackupPC is backing up a hard
drive. With "tail -F /var/log/messages" running I saw EXT3 mentioned a
few days ago and started suspecting a hard drive problem.

Last night it happened again.  This time my "tail ..." window was
opened full screen so I saw all the messages and know more.  Here's
part of what I wrote down (until I got tired of writing): 

  BUG unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000008
  IP   ffffff8027ce14 free_block+0xb4/0x160
  PGD 11b638067 PUD 11b631067 PMD 0
  Oops 0002[1]SMP
  ...
  Call Trace
     8027cac0 cache_flusharray+0x60/0xe0
     8027cc46 kmem_cache_free

I'm running a 2.6.25-gentoo-r7

To learn more about what's happening (and to more easily record
all the kernel messages), I'm now running "tail -F /var/log/messages"
from a second machine (via an SSH session).  

Questions:  

  Is there a better way to capture the full BUG output???
  Once I have the full BUG output, what's the next useful thing to do?

Thanks!

David