Hello -
I've been running Debian 2.0 on an HP Brio, PMMX166, 16 M RAM. This
morning I was greeted by a bizarre message when I tried to log in at the
console -- some of the messages flashed by too quickly b/c mingetty cleared
the screen, but there was a memory error for crypt, and after a few tried
the console was locked out ("respawning too fast") -- OK. I tried
telnetting to the machine and it wouldn't come up, so I decided the only
thing I knew to do would be to note the problem and restart it and see if
it got better. Ctrl-alt-del then gave the following errors, which I wrote
down:
/sbin/shutdown: error in loading shared libraries
libc.so.6: cannot map zero-fill pages: Cannot allocate memory
/sbin/mingetty: error in loading shared libraries
(last two lines repeated to fill most of the screen)
So, I just now power-cycled the machine, and
I hadn't actually logged onto this machine since last Friday, but another
user was on it yesterday, so I'm not at all sure when the problem could
have started. I'll have to ask him if he observed any odd behavior
yesterday. After starting the machine back up just now, it seems to be
operating normally again. The only log entries for today seem to be from a
cron job (checkerr ran at 6:42 and su'ed to both nobody and mail,
apparently) and to my failed attempt to log onto the machine just now.
I'm left wondering a few things:
(1) Could this be a hardware problem, perhaps with the RAM? I've had
misbehavior a couple of weeks back related to memory as well -- chmod was
SEGVing and an strace showed it dying in the low-level memory allocation.
Replacing the fileutils package got it working again, but two problems like
this make me really wonder.
(2) Could there be a memory leak or just not enough RAM/swap? The only
software other than the basics is apache and PHP3, but that should have
been quite idle all night since it's a development machine.
So does anyone here have any ideas?
Chris
________________________________________________________
Chris Kaltwasser [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Director of Online Services Project Vote Smart
Office: (541) 737-0747 FAX: (541) 737-3701
1-888-VOTE SMART (1-888-868-3762)
http://www.Vote-Smart.org
