[plug] Alternating caps problem

[Steve Grasso]

Hi Arkem,

On Friday 26 October 2001 07:34, Arkem wrote:
> I woke up this morning to a very wierd and disturbing situation on my
> computer. In a few select directories (and their subdirectories) off
> my home directory all the file names have been mutilated, some have
> just been converted into alternating caps versions of their previous
> names others have had odd characters inserted into them and in some
> cases whole subdirectories have become empty. This occoured sometime
> between 8pm and 6:30am (At 6:27 or so a cron job ran and its output
> was the first to indicate something was wrong) and the only log
> entries that may be of relevance were this section from
> /var/log/messages: (appologies for the spam)
>
> Oct 26 06:16:18 mornmist -- MARK --
> Oct 26 06:28:40 mornmist kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 {
> DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
> Oct 26 06:28:40 mornmist kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 {
> DriveStatusError BadCRC }
> Oct 26 06:28:40 mornmist kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 {
[snip]

The kernel is detecting errors in data being sent across the UDMA bus (viz. 
dma_intr associated with BadCRC).

Causes: Evil HD controller, evil HD, evil HD cable / cable loose / cable 
running by a source of electrical noise eg. fan, another device.

I've heard some drives are more prone to this than others eg. some Fujitsu 
drives.

>
> hda1 is particion that this all happened on (its mounted as /home)
> does this log indicate that hda is failing? Or is this possibly the
> result of an intrusion? If its a simple intrusion does anyone know
> how I could easily reverse the alternating caps problem? (how would I
> for example write a shell script that mv's all files so they all have
> lower case names?)

#!/bin/sh
for file in $*
do
if [ -f $file ]
then
  lcfile=`echo $file | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`
  if [ $file != $lcfile ]
  then
    mv -i $file $lcfile
  fi     
fi
done

(I pinched the above from someone else BTW. OK, I admit I'm lazy! -- which 
according to Larry Wall is one of the attributes of a half-decent programmer 
;-P)

Regards,
Steve