[Gllug] Temporary bash corruption

[Andrew Halliwell]

> Hi,
>  
> A strange thing happend to my machine over the weekend.  I had been merrily
> working away for a few hours using various terminals and then suddenly when
> I opened a new terminal it would immediatly exit.  I tried logging in to a
> virtual terminal ( rather than a terminal in x ) and got the same thing.
> After playing around for a while I discovered that if I tried to run bash
> from an already open terminal it would exit immediatley with a segmentation
> fault.  I managed to get it to dump a core file but then realised I didn't
> have a debugger and no way to install one as I couldn't log in as root.  I
> copied bash from my other PC (Same version, same distribution) and did a
> diff which reported that the files were different.  I eventually gave up
> trying to save my machine and rebooted.  After re-booting everything worked
> fine!  Doing the same diff reported that the files were identical.  Examing
> the log files showed nothing unusual.  I don't have any idea where to start
> looking for the cause and wondered if anyone could suggest anything.

I think I'd suggest running memtest (www.memtest86.org) on the machine
overnight.

Sounds to me a RAM bit may he been flipped that was holding buffered files
(bash residing on the buggered bit), so when it tried to run it failed.
Rebooting caused the caches and buffers to be cleared and new instances of
bash to be loaded.

Well... that's my guess anyway.


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