[CentOS] Commands failing silently?
Dan Bongert
dbongert at wisc.edu
Mon Mar 24 21:19:00 UTC 2008
mouss wrote:
> Dan Bongert wrote:
>> Hello all:
>>
>> I have a couple CentOS 4 servers (all up-to-date) that are having
>> strange command failures. I first noticed this with a perl script that
>> uses lots of system calls.
>>
>> thoth(66) /tmp> uname -a
>> Linux thoth.ssc.wisc.edu 2.6.9-67.0.7.ELsmp #1 SMP Sat Mar 15 06:54:55
>> EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
>>
>> Nothing in either dmesg or /var/log/messages seems to indicate any
>> problems. It also doesn't seem to matter what the command is -- ls is
>> the quickest test, but sshd will sometimes to fail to spawn children,
>> etc. There aren't a large amount of processes on the machine either --
>> only 122 at the moment.
>>
>> Has anyone seen this behavior before? Have I been hit with some sort
>> of cunning rootkit? This machine shouldn't be publicly accessible;
>> it's behind our firewall.
>
> where is /tmp mounted? is this an external disk (usb, ...)? is it an nfs
> mount?
It's a local disk:
thoth(97) /tmp> df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md4 16G 77M 15G 1% /tmp
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
--
Dan Bongert dbongert at wisc.edu
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