"Device not configured" after every command, crashing

[Antonio Lupher]

I'm a newbie running FreeBSD (I believe it's 4.4... am at the moment unable 
to check, as the computer is down) to host some of my websites.  I sent a 
query to this mailing list before about receiving some errors when trying to 
access my website, after which, ssh would stop logging me into the server 
("Connection closed by [server ip]"), and all web pages would bring up a 
"Forbidden" error.  After this, the server would go down completely... or at 
least I was unable to ping it, access it through http, or anything else that 
I tried...

This has been happening regularly, about every 3-7 hours after the computer 
is rebooted.  However, while the computer is running, I can distinguish 
nothing out of the ordinary.

However, tonight, it "crashed" while i was logged in through ssh.  Suddenly, 
almost every command that I issued or program I tried to run came back as 
"Device not configured."
e.g.:
# reboot
/sbin/reboot : Device not configured

Some things work... (lynx, ping, ps -- all seem to work fine) but many other 
commands just return the "Device not configured" or "Segmentation fault" 
errors.  Also very odd: ls, cd, pwd, etc. seem to work fine, but when I ls 
any directory, no files come up.  It is completely blank....

Anyway, I'm very scared and at my wit's end.  The system will appear normal 
once it's rebooted, but the same thing will happen within a few hours... Any 
suggestions on what to look for?  Are there certain log files that may 
contain information on this?  I think the most recent thing I did to the 
server was several weeks ago, when I installed "wusage" to analyze web 
logs... i had since deleted it.  Maybe something went wrong there? Hmmm....

Thanks!
-antonio

I have also noticed two processes running that I hadn't seen before:

   6 con  Is+    0:00.11 sh /etc/rc autoboot
447 con  I+     0:00.00 sh /etc/rc autoboot
Errors when trying to access a php/mysql driven website....
Warning:  open(/tmp/sess_4a23ba911863d07812e9cdf99656586f, O_RDWR) 
failed: Device not configured (6) in

Warning:  open(/tmp/sess_4a23ba911863d07812e9cdf99656586f, O_RDWR) 
failed: Device not configured (6) in Unknown on line 0
 Warning:  Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the 
current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line 
0
=======================================================

I then try to login via ssh... but I get "Connection closed by [my ip]".
It seems to me there is something wrong with your /tmp filesystem, causing 
both php and apache to be unable to write temp files, and also causes 
problems for several other daemons.
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