I had a peculiar event on my AlphaStation 500 last week and I'm not quite sure
what to make of it. I had been logged in overnight but my screen was locked,
and after I unlocked it in the morning I found that typical unix commands would
not work or worked erroneously and that many of my directories were empty.
Oddly enough an ls command would list the files but ls -l would indicate that
the files could not be found.
I logged out meaning to log back on as root but before the logout was completed
the blue screen came up with a continuous stream of errors reported. I shut
down and restarted; fsck ran fine on all but the /usr/users/ partition. There
it required a manual fsck. I had to run that twice because on the first attempt
I was trying to be somewhat judicious as to what I took out. All the problems
were in my personal directory. When the machine came up what was left of my
home directory was mangled. Other users on the system were not affected
apparently. This is what bothers me. If the disk had failed wouldn't more than
my directory have suffered. Files are physically spread across the disk so that
it is unlikely that a sector failure would affect only one person's files. Or
am I wrong about this? Fortunately I had a recent backup, and since restoring
my files all seems well -- well almost. The system and binary logs didn't
record anything strange. Also, there weren't any jobs or applications running
on the system when the trouble occurred. My directories were being used for
code development -- nothing there that would affect the system.
My question is: Are these symptoms of disk failure or does this look like a
malicious hack? I considered myself lucky in that I haven't suffered either
before, but at the moment I'm a bit bewildered. What should I be looking for?
Any commentary will be greatly appreciated, and I'll summarize, of course.
Thanks,
Scott Taylor
smt_at_gamma.physics.uiowa.edu
Received on Mon Sep 27 1999 - 15:03:30 NZST