On Thu, 1 May 1997, Rick Jones wrote:
>
> This is just something for the think tank. I thing Dale is more than
> likely correct, but a few months ago I was getting segmentation faults
> whenever I would try to run man (maybe some others I don't remember right
> now). The problem was that for some reason when I installed linuxconf, I
> believe, and changed files back manually it stopped setting my hostname.
>
> I don't understand it but when I set the hostname it stopped giving me the
> error. I just wanted to throw another possibility in for you to think
> about.
Lack of a host name will cause several useful parts of the system to
segfault. This is why there is a default value provided during
installation (among other reasons).
Segfaults are by no means only obtained by faulty hardware. Faulty
software can produce them as well. The key point in this particular
problem was that two earlier machines had the same software installed on
them and they produced no such errors. If software runs on one machine and
not on another, it is a pretty fair assumption that it is faulty hardware
on the other machine. This is not always the case, but it makes a good
starting point for debugging. This is specially true when the error is
erratic, happening at different times, and not always.
I have an old 486 that can't make it through a kernel install because of
problems with cache, but if the source files didn't get corrupted during
installation (yep it even trashes file copies occasionally) I only need to
restart the make and it will, eventually, finish building the kernel.
Errors range from signal 11, to sytax errors, and even undefined
variables. Each of these errors fails to occur on a successive run of make
and the process is completable. Note: I don't do this kind of work on that
machine normally, and the machine runs WindBlows quite happily. Well, the
machine is happy anyway ;-)
Luck,
Dwarf
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