Don't give people not familiar with SLES/Open Enterprise Server the wrong impression here. We've been using it (the complete Open Workgroup Suite) for about two years now and it works great.
The uptime/stability totally beats the crap out of some other vendors.

Also OES1 was the first release on Linux, so it had some issues that were fixed by SP1 and other updates. Open Enterprise Server 2 SP1 is a completely different experience compared to OES1 without any SP/updates.

But I'm not familiar with your situation so YMMV.

Isn't it Windows that's often doing that? Crapping out with the most vague error message you can possibly imagine and ending in: 'Please contact your system administrator'

Luckily, as a system administrator you have the ability to look right through the computer case and into the RAM modules to see exactly what has gone wrong in this particular case. Otherwise this kind of error message could just blow your day.