For those of you who have been following the drama (if you can call it that) of my Linux box, I have a few things to report.

First of all, memtest86 was very quick to identify a memory location on some "KingstonValueRam" that had taken residency in my computer was bad. It failed every single test thrown at it, so I took it out. I think this should solve the problem the computer had with randomly shutting down and restarting. I did find a kernel patch that would allow me to specify a specific portion of the ram to block out, but I figured ram that works on this old of an architecture is cheap, if not free, so it wouldn't be worth my time.
Note: memory that is not fastened securely in its respective slot will, most certainly, fail every test it is given.

Next: as it was speculated, this was not my problem. Not in the least. The computer still did/does not boot. I can find no obvious reasons for this. Specifically, it is failing when trying to load various parts of its network package. I questioned my network card's stability, but I loaded up a liveCD and the ethernet card worked as expected. As far as I can tell, all I have left to do is sort through mounds of logfiles. Many of them show attempted log ins, but I can't tell of any that make it through that aren't expected. (if you gracious and would like to take a look at these logs, they're on my BSD box.) I am starting to remember a problem nearly identical to this that I saw about seven months ago, but dismissed it as some "rookie mistake" I might have made, and reformatted since it was merely a test box. (Note: I am fully aware that what has happened could also be a rookie mistake)

So, I still do not have my MTA working, my webserver working, nor pretty much everything I use on my server. Hopefully I can figure out a way to get this up and running soon.