i have a RH7.3 Server with Kernel 2.4.18-3smp working well for about 6
months now.
today i got an error saying:

 Assertion failure in journal_write_metadata_buffer() at
journal.c:406: "buffer_jdirty(jh2bh(jh_in))"
 ------------[ cut here ]------------
 kernel BUG at journal.c:406!
 invalid operand: 0000
 soundcore mppe ppp_deflate zlib_deflate ppp_async ppp_generic slhc
ipt_MASQUER
 CPU:    1
 EIP:    0010:[<f8858984>]    Tainted: P
 EFLAGS: 00010282
 EIP is at journal_write_metadata_buffer [jbd] 0x74 (2.4.18-3smp)
 eax: 0000001d   ebx: 00000000   ecx: c02eee60   edx: 001e9099
 esi: 00000000   edi: f40b6e20   ebp: e9593520   esp: f7745e44
 ds: 0018   es: 0018   ss: 0018
 Process kjournald (pid: 18, stackpage=f7745000)
 Stack: f885d161 00000196 00001adb f7753000 00000000 00000000 e9593310
00000000
        f40b6e20 e9593520 f8855dc4 f40b6e20 e9593310 f7745e98 00001c05
f7745ed0
        00000001 000003f4 f115000c 00000001 f40b6e20 e391ae80 00001c05
00000286
 Call Trace: [<f885d161>] .rodata.str1.1 [jbd] 0x4e1
 [<f8855dc4>] journal_commit_transaction [jbd] 0x7e4
 [<c010758d>] __switch_to [kernel] 0x3d
 [<c0119048>] schedule [kernel] 0x348
 [<f88587d6>] kjournald [jbd] 0x136
 [<f8858680>] commit_timeout [jbd] 0x0
 [<c0107286>] kernel_thread [kernel] 0x26
 [<f88586a0>] kjournald [jbd] 0x0
 Code: 0f 0b 5e 5f 8b 7c 24 28 8b 4f 0c 85 c9 74 2e c7 44 24 0c 01

I had to reboot the machine to get it to work again.
Can anyone tell me why that is happening.
Do i have to update the kernel (and why) or can i stay with my
version?
I don't want to get this error more often.

Regards Wolf