[techtalk] bizarre....

[Lighthouse Keeper in the Desert Sun]

Okay, so today I was using my ppp connection for several hours, then we
went to watch Sunday night Fox and came back.  I have the command to dial
aliased to include tail -f /var/log/messages.  I told it to dial, and it
said "tail: no such file /var/log/messages."  I said "Uhhhhh...." and
tried again, a few times.  I got the same result.  I cd'd to /var/log, and
tehre were a total of 3 files there.  And I believe they were all
directories.  It got too weird, so I rebooted.  I did it twice, because
sendmail was taking ages to start and giving bizarre errors.  So I told it
to stop running sendmail and httpd on startup, since I don't even use them
anyway.  After the reboot, /var/log/messages reappeared and was fine and
ppp worked fine.  So then the problem was that my tty (mingetty) was set
to 'dumb' instead of vt100.  I can't figure that one out.  I also
periodically get messages (write style) from syslogd in assorted garbage.
It is weird high ascii stuff, i think.  There is something about 'not able
to piece together parts of message.'  This all started sometime between 8
and 10 pm tonight.  I am running ip masquerading and ipchains over a ppp
dialup.  Talking to a group of friends who use linux wasn't helpful,
except in stopping sendmail and httpd on boot.
I'm getting close to going "gyaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrgh" and hitting it.  Help?

Conni

-- 
So they linked their hands and danced 'round in circles and in rows.
			-Loreena McKennitt

http://www.one-eyed-alien.net/~ccovingt

http://www.angelfire.com/anime/Galadriel



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