[sclug] Victim of unprovoked power pailures

[Alex Butcher]

On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, Patrick wrote:

> My laptop/firewall which had Debian Slink installed aeons ago and has served 
> as a reliable mail server for 6 years has finally started to protest after 
> years of being turned off by builders messing about with the fusebox and the 
> missus messing about with the hoover.
>
> Last night there was a power failure in Earley whcih lasted over an hour and 
> when i got up this morning, it wasn't working right.
>
> enterprise root # /etc/init.d/samba restart
> Stopping Samba daemons: /etc/init.d/samba: line 81:  3818 Segmentation fault 
> sleep 1

[snip]

>> Code:  Bad EIP value.
> <1>Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 08e8c358
> printing eip:
> 08e8c358
[...]
> Process sleep (pid: 1333, stackpage=c2f4b000)

Well, before panicing, I'd start by using dpkg to verify all the files in
the package that provides the 'sleep' binary. Chances are, it's become
corrupt, somehow (do you put mostly-quiescent files on the same partition as
frequently rewritten files, like /var/log/* ?)

If the verify fails, try reinstalling that package. It might also be wise to
do a full system verify to uncover any other potential nasties that might be
waiting for you to find at an even more inconvenient time!

Only if such steps fail would I consider doing a clean OS reinstall. And
only if /that/ failed would I start suspecting hardware.

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>