Hi all,
I am new to this list, but I haven't found an answer in the archives.
I am trying to find out if it is possible for the texconfig program
within teTeX 1.0.6 to wipe out a hard disk. Right now it is my
leading suspect for a system wipe I am recovering from. Here are the
details:
System: NeXTstep 3.3 running on a NeXTstation (moto 68040 proc.)
(Basically, BSD 4.3 unix with DPS based GUI)
Using compiled binaries from NeXT archive (www.peak.org/next/).
Initial installation was successful and ran well for over a week.
I decided to enable $TEXMFVAR and $HOMEMF variables in texmf.cnf.
After saving texmf.cnf, I ran texconfig, as root, from the command
line without any arguments. It began to start up (gave a couple of
messages which I don't remember, not warnings). During this period,
there was a lot of disk activity which I took to be a file search in
progress. Since it takes some time for the dialog menu to come up on
the older NeXTstations, I went to run some errands for 30 mins. When I
returned, the machine had frozen. It turns out that the root disk and
all mounted disks had been wiped. It was as if a rm -rf * had been
run. Note, this machine is in a secured room so no one would have had
direct access to the console. However, it is part of a University
network. It is possible, however unlikely, that someone cracked our
machine just as I was running texconfig. Unfortunately, all log files
were wiped with the system.
Needless to say, I would like to track down what the possible causes
could be. Is there some way I could have messed up the texmf.cnf file
so that texconfig would run amuck?
Thank you,
Ryan Scott
PS. Once I get everything completely up, I will try to recreate the
problem on a similar, although less critical, machine.
