[PLUG] Strange and mysterious Linux crash

Alan alan at clueserver.org
Fri Apr 12 15:21:22 UTC 2002


On Thursday 11 April 2002 12:52 pm, Matt Alexander wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Wil Cooley wrote:
> > Also Sprach Matt Alexander <m at netpro.to> on Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at
> > 11:58:35AM PDT
> >
> > > So my Linux box just locked up.  I was running VMWare, AIM, Konq,
> > > KMail, and quite a few Konsole sessions.  I couldn't kill X.  So, I
> > > grudgingly rebooted, but I got a message about a kernel panic and not
> > > finding init. Odd.  So I booted from a floppy and mounted my
> > > filesystem.  Here's what I found:
> > >
> > > /bin, /lib, and /opt are no longer directories.  /bin is now a copy of
> > > my passwd file.  /lib is now a copy of my group file.  And /opt is
> > > another copy of my passwd file.  /usr/local/lib is now a copy of
> > > something that looks like a sound config file, with entries like
> > > "synth:64:64:R" and "pcm:64:64:P".
> > >
> > > SoooooooOOOOooOOOOoOOOoo...  what the heck happened?  Any guesses?
> >
> > Do you have an Athlon system with a Via chipset and this
> > filesystem is on an IDE drive?
>
> Nope.  PII-400 and SCSI.

What distribution and kernel version are you using?

If it is Mandrake 8.2, then I think I know what is happening. (There is a 
rather nasty bug involving devfs and one of the kernel patches they use. 
(Probably the grsecurity patch, judging by the ksymoops crash dumps.)






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