fedora 8 hacked?

Roger Heflin rogerheflin at gmail.com
Sat Apr 26 16:20:48 UTC 2008


tom lee wrote:
> 2008/4/25 Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com>:
> 
>> Your root filesystem probably got corrupted. When the kernel detects
>> filesystem corruption, the partition usually gets remounted read-only.
>>
>> Run "shutdown -r -F now". This will reboot and refsck your root partition.
> 
> I tried "reboot" before and it got nput/output error. has to power off
> and on machine for rebooting.
> right now, the machien is in use and I cannot shut it down for
> testing. maybe later.
> 
> it looks that it renders all partition as read-only. I don't like such
> a design. if it crashes, let it crash. why remounting as read-only to
> play smart?  it is better to reboot with "showdown -r -F now" right
> away
> rather than getting into such a dumb read-only stage that nobody knows
> that it has something wrong right away. it took one day to know that
> this OS has the problem.

Because, if you keep writing to a corrupted filesystem you can end up destroying 
the entire filesystem completely and lose *ALL* of your data and that is worse.

The problem is that it may or may not crash before it destroys the filesystem 
competely, and if the OS is written robustly it should not crash just because 
the filesystem tables are corrupted (and Linux has done some testing with 
something that puts random data on the filesystem to make sure that it does not 
crash in those random corrupted data cases).

> 
>>From this perspective, I  think microsoft way of crasing is a better
> design. at least you know some wrong right away and reboot the
> computer automatically can get it fixed.

That was not their design, MS tends to try to work around errors rather than 
report the errors, so if then you get an error, it tries to cope and then you 
get a completely unrelated cryptic error that really tells you nothing.  If if 
the crash said nothing useful to identify the failing component is it useless, 
you have no idea what to fix, just crashing tells someone nothing.

If you had checked dmesg there should have been a clear error indicating what 
happened, if all of the partitions on the filesystem were RO then I would 
suspect that the disk itself quit talking, next time make sure to check dmesg 
and see what it says.

                                   Roger




More information about the users mailing list