William L. Maltby wrote:
On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 16:19 -0500, Dan Bongert wrote:
mouss wrote:
Dan Bongert wrote:
Hello all:
<snip>
Though 'ls' was just an example -- just about any program will fail. The 'w' command will fail too:
thoth(118) /tmp> w 16:06:51 up 5:34, 1 user, load average: 0.94, 1.46, 2.04 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT dbongert pts/0 copland.ssc.wisc 14:16 0.00s 0.22s 0.05s w
thoth(119) /tmp> w 16:06:52 up 5:34, 1 user, load average: 0.94, 1.46, 2.04 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT dbongert pts/0 copland.ssc.wisc 14:16 0.00s 0.22s 0.05s w
thoth(120) /tmp> w
thoth(121) /tmp> w
Hmmm... Sure it's failing? Maybe just the output is going somewhere else? After the command runs, what does "echo $?" show? Does it even work? Echo is a bash internal command, so I would expect it to never fail.
Ok, it's definitely getting an error from somewhere:
thoth(3) /tmp> ls
thoth(4) /tmp> echo $? 141
Although:
thoth(31) ~> top
thoth(32) ~> echo $? 0
What is your output device? A serial terminal? If so, could be simple flow control issues. In fact, any serial connection (even a PC emulating a terminal) could suffer from flow control problems. And they would tend to be erratic in nature.
I'm usually sshing into the machine, but I've also experienced the problem on the console.
If you are on a normal console, try running the commands similart to this (trying to determine if *something* else is receiving output or not)
<your command> &> /dev/ttyif this works reliably, maybe that's a starting point.
Nope, that fails intermittently as well.
There's a couple kernel guys who frequent this list. Maybe one of them will have a clue as to what could go wrong. Corrupted libraries and whatnot.
You might try that rpm -V command earlier against all packages (add a "a" IIRC). Maybe some library accessed by the coreutils, but which is not itself part of coreutils, is corrupt.
Hmm....when I do a 'rpm -Va', I get lots of "at least one of file's dependencies has changed since prelinking" errors. Even if I run prelink manually, and then do a 'rpm -Va' immediately afterwards.