The Linux AUdit Subsystem (LAuS) was enabled by default for RHEL-3 systems pre-U5,
which in retrospect appears to have been a mistake - systems clean-installed from
a RHEL-3-U5 or later do not have the audit system enabled by default.

The 'audit' service will maintain logs of all auditable events and system calls
occuring on the system in /var/log/audit.d/* . 

Once the free disk space under /var/log/audit.d/ falls below a threshold 
configurable in /etc/audit/audit.conf:
"
  notify          = "/usr/sbin/audbin -S /var/log/audit.d/save.%u -C -T 20%";
"
audit will be unable to create further disk logs and will enter the state
configurable in /etc/audit.conf, which is by default:
"
       error {
                action {
                        type = suspend;
                };
"
You can stop LAuS putting the system into suspend mode when it is unable 
to write audit logs by removing the 'action { type=suspend; }' clause 
above. 

If you do not want to enable auditing on your system, then simply:
  # chkconfig --level=0123456 audit off
and reboot; no more logs will be created and nothing else depends 
on audit being enabled - this is the default for post-U5 clean-installed
systems.

Or, if you want to continue running with audit enabled, you can adjust the
threshold in /etc/audit/audit.conf:
'
  notify          = "/usr/sbin/audbin -S /var/log/audit.d/save.%u -C -T 1%";
'
or make audbin delete the old log files by default so that the default is
never reached:
'
  notify          = "/usr/sbin/audbin -S /var/log/audit.d/save.%u -C -T 10% \
                     -N '/bin/rm -f %f'
' 
or move old log files to a different location:
'
   notify          = "/usr/sbin/audbin -S /var/log/audit.d/save.%u -C -T 10% \
                     -N '/bin/mv -f %f /another_partition/'
 
'
or process old log files with some script:
'
   notify          = "/usr/sbin/audbin -S /var/log/audit.d/save.%u -C -T 10% \
                     -N '/bin/my_audit_log_rotation_script %f'
 
'

Systems which are to be audited must not allow the system to be used if 
auditing is not possible - this is demanded by the audited system 
certification requirements, and is the way LAuS is designed to operate.

You do not need to enable audit by default - if you don't require auditing,
just disable the 'audit' service as described above.

If you do enable auditing, you need to configure a mechanism for rotation
of log files so that the audit logs do not exhaust the free space on the
audit log directory partition. As shown above, LAuS provides many flexible
mechanisms with which to do this, which are fully documented in the man-pages
: audit.conf(5), audit(4), laus(7), audbin(1) .

Hence, this is 'NOTABUG' - the audit daemon was only doing what it was
told to do by the site configuration and was behaving as designed.