RH EL 3 | 'nightly SSH crash

Greetings -

For the past several days, my RH EL 3 box has been suffering from some sort of crash where SSH stops responding - Apache keeps chugging away, but I can't log into to the system via SSH telnet, SCP, or anything else using SSH. What is even more weird is that I can't login from the box itself (as either a user, or root), so maybe its a SSH issue, and maybe it isn't. What's weird is that apache keeps serving up pages no problem - I simply can't access the machine.

So, after a hard reboot, things are just fine.

So, my *guess* is that something is running at night which is causing the problem. Most of the cron jobs are either system jobs, or things that seem pretty benign. But, apparently not.

So, suggestions for debugging? I've looked at most of the log files invar-log, but haven't seen anything at all of interest. Is there somewhere specific I should look? If I can't find a log of the 'offending event', not sure what to do next.

Thanks!A morning hard reboot is easy, but under those circumstances, its not much different than Windows. ;-)