[techtalk] bizarre....

[wizard111 at netzero.net]

FIRST do an e2fsck on your drives, perhaps you have a bad HD 
that has a spreading corruption (read; bad part of the media that's 
spreading (surface "sluffing", was a rather common problem with 
conner HD's back before Seagate bought them out).
Second, re-verify your init.d files, make certain that nobody got into 
your machine and put nasty things there.
Last, triple check ownerships and permissions on /var, /usr, /sbin, 
/... to be sure that nothing was corrupted in the access information 
flags.
> 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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> techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org
> 
> 


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