[plug] For the deb heads

[Brad Campbell]

I had a minor catastrophe to do with some dodgy insulation on an internal cable and a loose spring 
inside the case that caused my laptop to power off right in the middle of a major metadata write 
with an ext3 filesystem.

The crux of which was a serious e2fsck and lots of damaged files (particularly system files as it 
was in the middle of an apt-get upgrade). Interestingly enough I only noticed this as lots of these 
messages in my syslog. On bootup ext3 was convinced it was perfectly healthy!

Sep  7 11:13:35 bklaptop kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
Sep  7 11:13:35 bklaptop kernel: 03:01: rw=0, want=1566037344, limit=7036438
Sep  7 11:13:35 bklaptop kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
Sep  7 11:13:35 bklaptop kernel: 03:01: rw=0, want=1549258084, limit=7036438

Anyway, one "simple" command later and all corrupted system files were restored to their former 
glory and a fully functioning system returned to normal. (of course only any good if you actually 
use debsums. It's worth it, honest!)

apt-get --reinstall install `debsums -c | while read i ; do dpkg -S $i ; done | cut -f1 -d":" | sort 
| uniq`

(Watch the wrap)

Debsums has proven to be a great way of detecting hidden filesystem corruption (lots of that early 
on in the swsusp devel process) and is also a good way of detecting rootkits and other nastiness.
It's no substitute for a good backup though.

Regards,
Brad