Server 'freezing'

[Tim Seufert]

On Thursday, December 19, 2002, at 10:12  AM, Rob Brandt wrote:

>> I suspect my problem, as well as yours, is hard disk related.
>> I've ran TechTools from OS9 and everything is fine except for
>> the test it can't run: linux drive test.  The e2fsprogs suite,
>> which fsck is part of, has a utility called badblocks which
>> obviously checks your drive for bad blocks.  I have yet to try
>> it.  My system is a production
>> system so I'm a little leary about hosing the filesystem.
>
> man badblocks advises that this command should be run through
> e2fsck  with the -c parameter, which I did.  On two tries, at
> (near?) identical places, I got "Segmentation Fault"s.  At which
> time it seems to have crashed.

The weird thing is that you get a segfault.  That means the program 
tried to access memory it didn't own, or some similar problem.  An 
unexpected segfault (they can happen due to bugs, but the e2fsprogs 
suite should be pretty stable) usually points towards bad RAM, not bad 
disk, though certainly corruption of executables could cause such 
problems.  You can find out if they're corrupted; what happens if you 
do the following command?

rpm --verify e2fsprogs

If this doesn't print anything, every file in the e2fsprogs RPM checks 
out OK (i.e. the MD5 checksum matches the one stored in the RPM 
database), but if you get some stuff printed out, some of the files are 
bad.