Grr, yes. I guess we can but hope that it's reproducible enough that someone can make it happen again deliberately. As it stands, about the only clue I see there is the [tstile] in the ^T output, but I don't know whether that's useful or not. I wonder if you can come in via ssh a second time and do anything useful with gdb, either on ps or on /dev/kmem?
I suppose my language wasn't clear enough - yes, the hang occurred when I ran ps, but all (perhaps interactive?) processes hung - the other ssh sessions I had open hung, too, and one which accepted control-t also showed the tstile state, too.
What is interesting is that a control-t now, after a few days, shows a higher load average as though cron is still running or something like that:
load: 7.00 cmd: ps 12227 [tstile] 0.03u 0.14s 0% 1040k I'll reboot it tonight, I suppose. John