apparently the hard drive on my webserver (read old compaq laptop) fried itself.
However, the main pages of the site were apparently loaded in memory...as I tried to connect to the box to load some files and it promptly refused...and went all panicky when I tried to restart it.
My guess, given the message received locally as well as remote...it could very well have been running like this for the better part of a month.
So, if anyone is looking for my web page...its not there at the moment. Going to see about replacing it this week sometime.