A friend of mine has a linux redhat 7.2 install on a server. It crashes everytime it runs out of memory. It doesnt touch the swap file, instead it forks the server and crashes requiring a reboot.
Any ideas?

Thankyou.

Are you sure the swap file is active? What kernel version is he running? What do you mean by "forks the server?"

Some recent 2.4.x kernels have a OOM killer that behaves rather badly doing things such as killing init. I would be very surprised if Redhat's shipping kernel had this bug, however.