[Novalug] Something Strange

Paul W. Frields stickster@gmail.com
Fri Feb 4 09:21:53 EST 2011


On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 09:22:33PM -0500, Dan Arico wrote:
> I was downloading e-mail using Kmail when I lost my internet connection. 
> Afterwords kmail slowed to a crawl. I killed it and tried to continue the work 
> I had been doing. Dolphin had also slowed to a crawl. I tried rebooting. Then 
> Dolphin wouldn't come up at all.
> 
> My internet connection came back up so I tried bringing kmail back up. This 
> time it wouldn't start. Instead, I got a message window showing mysql errors - 
> specifically, corrupted files.
> 
> When in doubt, google. Firefox wouldn't start. Nor would opera.
> 
> I switched to my wife's computer and couldn't find much on-line other than 
> general discussions of corrupted databases.
> 
> By now, only the shell would load on my computer. I found NFS was still 
> working normally so I copied some critical files over to my laptop just to 
> make sure they were backed up. (my current work files)
> 
> Then pulled out my installation disk, booted from it and picked "update". Half 
> an hour later, everything was completely restored except for a couple of minor 
> tweaks. Whatever had been corrupted was overwritten and I lost nothing in the 
> process.
> 
> OpenSUSE 11.3 running on a 64-bit Intel processor.
> 
> Anybody have any ideas what happened?

This is purely a WAG since I can't read the relevant system/error
logs, but a full disk partition (especially the one containing /home
or /tmp) is a possible culprit.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
          Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com



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