Bizarre problem, at my wits' end
I am having the strangest problem.
As a demonstration, I took my Potato server into singleuser mode,
unmounted the partition mounted on /tmp, and overwrote the first 128k
with data from /dev/zero. I then rebooted (`shutdown -r now') to show
how fsck worked (new admin) - well, it also checked my RAID- seems that
something didn't work right when rebooting in single-user mode. So, it
checks the disks, and everything is fine. Except that ppp dosen't work.
After some debugging, I conclude that it is a problem with our ISP,
leave a message (it was Saturday) and leave the box.
Well, it wasn't an ISP problem. Something is very wrong with my box. My
serial ports don't work properly- pilot-xfer won't connect to my Palm
IIIx; ppp connections will start, but LCP packets seem not to get sent
even though pppd reports sending them; mgetty will answer the line, but
sends garbage. This was just after I ran apt-get to bring my system up
to date (no perl updates though) - it updated libc6 and some other
stuff.
All this happened on July 31st, and serial stuff still isn't working. I
have tried everything- a new kernel, re-configuring setserial,
adding/removing modems and serial ports (via BIOS), re-installing libc6,
including an older version.
Everything works fine on a different Potato box. Everything works fine
if I use a rescue boot/root disk.
Does anyone have some idea what has gone wrong and how I should fix it?
Is there an option other than reinstalling?
--
.-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Ian Eure <ieure@crosssound.narrows.com>
| Network Administrator, Cross Sound Appraisal Company
|
| "A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of
thinking."
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