I've had intermittant problems with one of my Debian systems. It's running potato and the 2.2.10 kernel-image in potato.
In the middle of June, I went on vacation and left the box up so I could dial-in and check faxes/emails. About a day after I came back, it crashed (yes..Linux crashed!) with kmod running in circles "Can't locate module binfmt-0000". Any attempts to run any programs gave me "Can't execute binary file". I rebooted, and was forced to run e2fsck on all of my filesystems manually. It took quite a while and fixed lots of problems, and also performed a bad-sector scan. I rebooted again, and found that my lost+found directories were full of files, and I began to discover that I was missing lots of files. I lost a 10MB mail folder, the /var/lib/dpkg/* databases, etc. Cursing myself for not having backed up recently, I reinstalled and mounted /home over NFS from my other system (thank god..its had no problems). Also, I formatted the drive under windows and discovered that it had 1 MB of bad sectors out of 6 GB. I've been running along happily until now. My system had been up about 7 days, until I discovered an unkillable process (gzip -9f /var/log/kern.log.0). Reading up on deja news, I tried killing it with various signals, attaching to it with gdb and strace. None worked. I couldn't log in anymore, either (hung the kernel in a blocking IO call?). So, I rebooted with Ctrl-Alt-Del. Init, said it was rebooting, but didn't do anything. I manually rebooted, and upon the "your filesystems have errors" fsck check, I got the binfmt-0000 message again. My filesystems have lots of errors now, and I don't want this reinstallation to be a regular procedure. What should I do? Has anyone had problems like these before? -- Stephen Pitts [EMAIL PROTECTED] webmaster - http://www.mschess.org