[plug] Debian puzzle, very weird.

[James Devenish]

In message <200304071935.58882.leon at brooks.fdns.net>
> 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).

Segfaults on sync? Can you get stack traces from Linux core dumps? Here
is GNU fileutils' sync.c code:

Copyright (C) 1994-2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
...
  program_name = argv[0];
  setlocale (LC_ALL, "");
  bindtextdomain (PACKAGE, LOCALEDIR);
  textdomain (PACKAGE);

  atexit (close_stdout);

  parse_long_options (argc, argv, PROGRAM_NAME, PACKAGE, VERSION,
              AUTHORS, usage);

  if (argc != 1)
    error (0, 0, _("ignoring all arguments"));

  sync ();
  exit (0);
...

Is 2.4.18 a useable kernel? (I know virtually nothing about Linux
kernels.)