Comment # 4 on bug 1008107 from David Taylor

I have not been able to reproduce the problem.  

I left the machine as-is for over a month to see if it would happen again (I
took it out of production use and let it sit with a different IP address). 
After running cleanly during that period of time, I patched it and put it back
into service.  The problem has not cropped up since then.  To be honest, I'm
not entirely certain what led up to that failure as it happened at night during
a quiet period.  The only thing going on during that time frame (for the most
part) was logs being rolled by logrotate and logwatch running reports as those
run at 1AM.

To correct the mounting /var issue, I had to flush the metadata.  The fsck hung
otherwise.  If there was something funky in it, it was destroyed in attempting
to get the volume back.

I have the before and after syslog files saved off if they are of any use, but
otherwise I'm afraid I don't have much else I can provide at this point.