On Thu, 11 Dec 2008, MHR wrote:
I am running CentOS 5.2 with all the latest updates with the GNOME DE and k3b. I put a DVD in the tray and tried to make a copy, but k3b says it can't copy an encrypted disk.
So, I installed libdvdcss from rpmforge:
libdvdcss.i386 1.2.9-2.el5.rf rpmforge
When I restarted k3b, it hung. After several minutes of waiting for it to respond, I found that the whole system had become unresponsive - no mouse movement or clicks, nor keyboard keys recognized. Unable to do anything else with the system, I rebooted it.
When the system came up, there were problems in /, so I had to run e2fsck manually on /, and it found and fixed a whole slew of errors. However, when the system rebooted after a successful fsck, there are now errors in efforts to access various files and directories under /var, mostly in /var/lock, but also /var/gdm (meaning no graphics), all kinds of daemons are not starting up, and so on.
Has anyone else seen anything like this? This is my primary desktop system at work (I'm using my backup system at the moment), and I need to have it back up a.s.a.p. Any suggestions?
Why would this be related to libdvdcss ? I really do not see any link between the filesystem problems and libdvdcss.
In the thread on the centos mailinglist you already identified the slowness to be related to an NFS mount.
What if your system had filesystem errors all along, and when you installed the libdvdcss package it triggered these error into a fatal state. When you rebooted, the filesystem is being checked since it was no longer clean. You ran fsck without first doing fsck -N to see what would happen.
The filesystem check also found out about all the other filesystem errors, and damaged files and brought the filesystem into a state where you see the problems you described. I would think you have had hardware problems, (or maybe your sudden reboot triggered a filesystem bug).
Again, I seriously doubt the problems you have had are related to the libdvdcss RPM package. And without any proof I don't feel tempted to take any action.