[plug] Debian puzzle, very weird.

[indy at THE-TECH.MIT.EDU]

On Mon, Apr 07, 2003 at 07:35:58PM +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:
> 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.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
this is a bit confusing? you mean touch,chmod,chown only cause problems
from a remote session?

> 
> 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


sync, df, touch, chmod, chown, grep

the odd one out here is grep... as the rest interact with the filesystem
any info on what grep b0rks with?

I'm a bit of a layer 1 guy... but it sounds like HD controller to me,
(assuming you're using "normal" kernels)

of course, it could be kernel or baseutils trouble, but i'm assuming
you didn't brew your own in a particlarly exotic way, so that would seem
to be unlikely..


Indy.


-- 
Indranath Neogy
<indy at the-tech.mit.edu>