[plug] Debian puzzle, very weird.

[Leon Brooks]

We have two Debian machines in the one facility, both doing similar but not 
identical odd things. Both Celerons on identical mobos (900 & 1100MHz), same 
network cards, both 512MB of RAM. Both were recently updated, both running 
2.4.18 kernel.

Machine A segfaults on sync or df, but not grep, and boring processes like 
touch, chmod and chown frequently hang (on ordinary files) and occasionally 
chew up gobs of RAM (like, hundreds of MB).

Machine B segfaults on sync or grep but df works fine.

Running chmod et al from the console doesn't seem to trigger Machine A's 
lunacy.

I tried `apt-get --reinstall install libc6' and ditto for grep on Machine B, 
to no obvious effect (no better, no worse). Shutting all and sundry down and 
fsck'ing (-f) doesn't report any error.

Banging head against wall doesn't seem to help. I'm about to force update on 
my own Debian gateway to see if it's something poisonous in recent updates.

Cheers; Leon