Horked-up system, Fedora 11

Wed Oct 14 06:47:10 MST 2009

On 10/13/2009 10:37 AM, Ed wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Vaughn Treude<vltreude at deru.com>  wrote:
>    
>> Hello again:
>> This is kind of embarrassing, but I found the problem.
>> I'd had scads of disk space before, so I hadn't thought of checking
>> that. The root partition was 100% full! There were gigantic message log
>> files under /var/cache/logwatch. For the time being I have disabled
>> SELinux since it was responsible for a good portion of these messages.
>> Guess I better figure out what it's supposed to be doing. :-)
>> Vaughn
>>
>>      
> It is usually a good idea to set up /var as it's own partition for
> this very reason - other reasons include mounting /var noexec and even
> nodev for security.
>    
     That's a good idea.  I was just pondering over that, when I was 
reconfiguring the system, whether it made sense to put stuff in separate 
partitions anymore. Normally I just have root and home.
> Disabling SELinux is just a kludge - if DRM is the problem, you might
> try a different video driver - what does your CentOS use? Is the video
> hardware OK with DRM? and are any of the capacitors on the card
> swollen - I've seen some with the same problems as mobos. It really
> presents when they are being driven hard.
>
>    
     I've never been thrilled with my drivers on Centos, either, due to 
the screensaver-hang problem. (At first I thought it was a coincidence, 
given that it was hanging when the machine was otherwise idle, and of 
course the screen saver would be on by then. But disabling it did make 
the problem go away.) I need to replace a hard drive soon, so I'll check 
the video card when I do that- doubt it's a hardware problem, though.
> I have found SELinux to be much better in Fedora 11 that the problem
> that it was in F10. Eventually you want to try running with it
> enforcing.
>
>    
     I need to research SELinux; I'm not very familiar with what it does.
     Thanks for the feedback.

     VT
> Ed
>
>    
>> Ryan Rix wrote:
>>      
>>> Hello Vaughn,
>>> Please see my comments and suggestions below...
>>>
>>> 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
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> oh noes! This sounds like a problem with the DRM kernel module... NOTE that
>>> it has nothing to do with Digitial Rights (or restrictions :-) ) management.
>>> It's Direct Rendering Modules for graphics.
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> This is how it sounds to me...
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> Please either attach that to a post here, pastebin it, or mail it to me
>>> offlist. This is probably the root of your issue. If it aborted during the
>>> install phase (which it most likely wouldn't do, but you never know) you
>>> have a good chance of hosing your system.
>>>
>>> Also a copy of /var/log/yum.log would help as well
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>>>> 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!
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> Please try a Yum update. If that doesn't fix your system, at least we will
>>> have some more information about what is incorrect.
>>>
>>> Ryan Rix
>>> Fedora KDE-Ambassadors-News
>>>
>>>
>>>        
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