I hosed my main desktop pretty badly a couple days ago, have reconciled myself to bad news and would appreciate some advice. (CentOS 5.3 fully updated but now backed down from kernel 2.6.18-128.7.1.el5 to 2.6.18-128.4.1.el5 just to try that.)
The whole debacle began when I was investigating my formerly-weekly backup script to run to completion. The backup is kept on an external USB-connected drive that is mounted and unmounted by the backup script. I have manually mounted it to retrieve a file but it has been months since I did that.
I deleted one copy of the backup, as I've done in the past and made a new crontab entry to try the backup again 2 or 3 minutes later. It was still running several hours later, which couldn't possibly be right. Next, I tried clearing the backup on the backup drive and manually copying directories to it. That didn't work too well, either. At some point, I tried to send an email using SeaMonkey and couldn't, because it was unable "to write a temporary copy". I quickly found that that wasn't all it couldn't write, too.
I tried restarting KDE, which got nowhere. Almost everything worked O.K. from the command line, the most obvious exception being that I was unable to read any man pages as a non-privileged user until after I had accessed that man page as root. I did an rpm -Va with output redirected to a USB memory dongle. There is stuff missing and mangled but nothing that raised my suspicion.
Finally, here is my selinux configuration. [rj@mavis ~]$ ls -l /etc/selinux/config -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 511 Dec 5 2007 /etc/selinux/config [rj@mavis ~]$ cat /etc/selinux/config # This file controls the state of SELinux on the system. # SELINUX= can take one of these three values: # enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced. # permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing. # disabled - SELinux is fully disabled. SELINUX=disabled # SELINUXTYPE= type of policy in use. Possible values are: # targeted - Only targeted network daemons are protected. # strict - Full SELinux protection. SELINUXTYPE=targeted # SETLOCALDEFS= Check local definition changes SETLOCALDEFS=0 [rj@mavis ~]$
Does anyone have any ideas how I might attack this thing? An epiphany has not been forthcoming. :-(