Hi, This is one that's got me stumped (I am still fairly new at this, however).
While using Netscape 4.51 (its the X11R5 version, if that makes any difference) under Debian "Slink" I tried to point the browser at one of the *.snm files in a new mail directory (I get the impression you're not supposed to do this, but how else do you learn?), and got some really disturbing behavior: every open xterm window started spouting error messages from "SYSLOGD" (accompanied by terminal bells, but I suppose that just adds drama) -- and I mean a lot of them, they looked like HTML code, but I'm not positive as they were going by too fast and I don't seem to have a permanent log of them anywhere. Since then I've had erratic program crashes with (so far) Netscape and XEmacs 20, both programs that use a lot of memory, but I don't know of anything else they have in common. The SCARY thing is, this is also happening to OTHER USERS (well, there's only one, but still). The "crash" behavior varies: sometimes I just lose the window (if run from an xterm, I get a "Bus Error" message on the terminal afterwards, at least with Netscape). Other times, the X-server apparently goes down dumping me out onto a text screen (I can recover by restarting xdm). Or it may just throw me back to the xlogin prompt. That says to me that whatever happened has damaged something in one of the system areas (i.e. not just files owned by me). I've already deleted Netscape's HTML caches, and eliminated cookies from websites I was looking at right before the incident. I've also used ... "find * -mtime ..." to identify files altered after the incident (this found that the files I mentioned were altered, also several /var/log/... files, but nothing that seems interesting). Now, if this were a Windows machine, I'd say I'd run out of memory, or swap space on the hard drive. However, none of the filesystems is more than 61% full -- (100s of megabytes are still available on /, /var, /tmp, /usr, and /home). Now, I don't actually know how to thoroughly check the swap partition, but "top" shows it as essentially unused. One thing, I've considered is that the swap mechanism might be broken in some way. The problem does tend to occur when system memory is mostly used up and no swap space has been. Examining syslog.conf, I find that messages that match "*.emerg" are sent to all users logged in (which appears to be the behavior I experienced), but they are not logged to disk, so I don't have a copy of what the errors were. I have not tried recreating the circumstances that (may have) caused the problem (I hesitate to do this, lest it do more damage). Its also possible that this was just a coincidence, and that I just happened to have some system resource problem at that time. Maybe I'm missing some basic system administration procedure. Oh yeah, I did of course reboot a couple of times (this apparently had no effect). I forced fsck on one of them, apparently it didn't find anything, though. Any ideas, references to documentation I ought to read, things I ought try, etc would be really handy. I would prefer to avoid the Windows solution (i.e. re-install EVERYTHING :) ). Sorry about the length, but I wasn't sure what details would be useful. Thanks a lot! -- -------------------------------------------- Terry Hancock [EMAIL PROTECTED]
