[Gllug] Temporary bash corruption

[Jonathan Dye]

Andrew Halliwell wrote:
>> 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.

That's about what I guessed at really but couldn't see a way of finding out
for sure.  I ran memtest about a month ago (just for the hell of it) and
came up with nothing but i'll give it another run tonight.

Is there a way of forcing the caches to be dropped and the disk to be
re-read?  Maybe I could use up all available memory and wait for the cache
to be dropped to reclaim some more memory.  Thing is I have to stop before I
really do use it ALL up.

JD


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