We are getting somewhere now...
I took out my cron job to auto-kickstart the webserver when the db went down, which was stupid because it went down at 1:15 AM this morning and nsd never recovered. :( I get a bunch of messages that it's trying to reconnect but it never did until I whacked it 7 hours later. Maybe it's nsd and not the driver but it was definitely DOA. (Still running w/o nsvhr.) So that is the bad news.
The good news is that the last query executed before the backend went down crashes 7.1.3 100% of the time. I tried it on my trusty SS10, too, so this one's definitely not a HW issue. Selecting soundex(null) -- from when someone leaves a search form blank -- crashes it hard. Doh! :)
Also I noticed that the 50 or so ns_pool errors in my logs have all happened with the same 3 memory addresses, which may indicate hardware issues, despite what 'memtest' said. Or maybe not. Haven't heard anything useful from AOLserver list yet, but I'm on digest format so we'll see tonight.
