Horked-up system, Fedora 11

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2009-10-11 at 04:30 -0700, Vaughn Treude wrote: 
> Hello all:
> Recently I upgraded my main Linux desktop to Fedora 11. Everything was 
> great, until a couple nights ago I was woken by a frantic beeping coming 
> from my office. It was my Fedora machine, which was spewing out weird 
> "SELinux troubleshoot" messages. I rebooted the machine, and it was 
> running very slowly, so I shut it down.
> Today I got time to look at it. The first thing I encountered was an 
> ominous error at login, something about "Gnome power management 
> configuration" being invalid. Then I discovered X would not start; it 
> went to a black screen and appeared to be hung. I could, however, log in 
> in console mode.
> The first thing I noticed was that my "messages" file in /var/log had 
> become humungous.
> About the time of the incident, there were several thousand messages of 
> this form:
> 
> Oct  8 07:41:48 vaughn kernel: [drm:r128_cce_stop] *ERROR* r128_cce_stop 
> called
> without lock held, held  0 owner f50efd20 f50efd20
> Oct  8 07:41:48 vaughn kernel: [drm:r128_cce_reset] *ERROR* 
> r128_cce_reset called without lock held, held  0 owner f50efd20 f50efd20
> Oct  8 07:41:48 vaughn kernel: [drm:r128_cce_start] *ERROR* 
> r128_cce_start called without lock held, held  0 owner f50efd20 f50efd20
> Oct  8 07:41:48 vaughn kernel: [drm:r128_cce_idle] *ERROR* r128_cce_idle 
> called
> without lock held, held  0 owner f50efd20 f50efd20
> 
> I googled this problem and discovered that (duh!) r128_cce refers to my 
> ATI Rage 128 driver. I wondered if this card was getting ready to give 
> up the ghost. (Previously I'd had occasionally lockups when in the 
> screensaver which I decided were probably video-related - when I turned 
> of the screen saver, the problems went away.) So I decided to try 
> rebooting the machine and logging in under my old Centos install 
> (luckily I'd saved that partition.) Centos booted OK, I logged in, and X 
> came up fine. So apparently the card is still working, though perhaps 
> the driver (in Fedora) got hosed.
> 
> So once again I checked out the /var/log/message file in the Fedora root 
> partition. In today's entry, the message file contains a bunch of error 
> messages of this type:
> Oct 10 20:09:43 vaughn gdm-simple-greeter[4745]: WARNING: could not get 
> gconf key '/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/recent-languages': Failed to contact 
> configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable 
> TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system 
> crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  
> 1: Could not send message to gconf daemon: Process /usr/libexec/gconfd-2 
> received signal 6)
> 
> Followed by some of these:
> Oct 10 20:09:56 vaughn setroubleshoot: SELinux is preventing 
> console-kit-dae (consolekit_t) "sys_resource" consolekit_t. For complete 
> SELinux messages. run sealert -l 20147317-bf50-4d55-819f-465501e5db55
> Oct 10 20:10:22 vaughn sedispatch: AVC Message for setroubleshoot, 
> dropping message
> 
> and then a whole boat load of these:
> Oct 10 20:31:49 vaughn kernel: Xorg:3937 freeing invalid memtype 
> e0196000-e019a000
> 
> So I don't know if I have a video problem, a network problem, a security 
> problem, an X problem, or if the machine's just totally hosed.
> Interestingly enough, I had just tried to run a security update on the 
> system the night before the Incident. For some unknown reason, it 
> aborted. I saved the bug report but it appears to be mostly memory dumps 
> which mean nothing to me.
> Unfortunately I usually don't bother to back up the root partition on a 
> new install until I've gotten everything configured just right. I'd 
> finally gotten there a few days before, but hadn't gotten around to 
> actually doing the backup.
> 
> So, any suggestions? Does it sound like it's so badly hosed I have to 
> reinstall?
> I suppose I could try the "repair" utility on the Fedora install disk, 
> but haven't had much luck with it in the past.
> I guess I could go back to the console login and try to do a yum update 
> manually. (Yum was working fine for configuring all my media players, so 
> I don't know why the recommended security update failed.)
> I'd appreciate any suggestions on the best course of  action!
> Thanks!
----
sudo fixfiles onboot

this will relabel everything

Craig


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