kernel crash on Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.66GHz 4-cpus machine

[Jean-Eric Cuendet]

> you mean a hardware failure could have provoked the crash and no messages
> have been written in any logfile?

Of course. Think of memory failure. Or NIC causing bad interrupt which 
panic the kernel.
In these cases, first thing is to do a memtest86 test. You have it in 
GRUB at startup.
That said, it could very well be a kernel bug also. Don't know.

> Right now the machine is up again and I am working on it. How could I 
> find out which is the problem?

Hard...
Test memory. That's the main cause I've seen that freeze the machine.
Also, just to be sure, what is the machine? Dell? Have you a SCSI RAID 
card? PERC3?
I had problems with that kind of hardware...
-jec