aptitude is failing with Hangup

[wookiebreath]

I have somehow got my Debian install into a strange state.

When I run aptitude to install a package after checking the dependencies and downloading the package... aptitude exits with the message Hangup and then my putty session becomes unresponsive (although it still thinks it's active).

I get the same response when I try aptitude via interactively or via the command line, it also happens with apt-get and dselect.

I've tried installing different packaged but the end result is always the same.

I'm not sure where to look to see what is causing this problem... any suggestions?

[wookiebreath]

Ahhh just found my problem....

I was sshing into the machine with putty.... this time instead of doing that I went down into the dungeon where the machine is kept, connected the keyboard and an old monitor and tried it from there....

Instead of seeing the Hangup signal I saw some out of memory errors... which led me to discover that I had zero swap configured (hmmm wonder if that was a step I missed during the Woody to Etch kernel upgrade)....

So the first thing that was happening when aptitude was running and using all the available memory was that my ssh session was getting killed..

Anyway I've setup a swap and things now seem to be working ok.