Tony Baldwin wrote: > Camaleón wrote: > > Okay, Tony, before going any further into this, are you sure that your > > hard disk and partitions are all fine? Were all the scary messages > > finally went away? How about the SMART test? > > There are no NEW such messages in dmesg. I was really worried there too. Those looked like a hardware related issue, not a software related issue. Probably just a cable but still. With the error from the syslog I would want to verify by unplugging and plugging back in the SATA cables. The older ones did not have any locks and would sometimes become dislodged. And even the newer ones might have a spot of corrosion on the connector that would be fixed by the remove and replace of the connector. These problems can show up after getting a "thump" from something like kicking out the power cord. Even just simple continuous vibration from the fans can cause things to walk around a little. > I ran fsck like 3 times, and the last time if finally ended with > File system has been modified... If there is a hardware issue be cautious about running fsck too early. The disk might be perfectly fine but getting a corrupted signal from a bad cable and the fsck modifications might actually be unneeded. > Nope. Not sure how that's done, but, anyway, the reason I want > iceweasel back is to have all my bookmarks and settings and saved > passwords, etc. Firefox has had such a history of problems that they wrote automatic backup of bookmarks into the browser! Well if they have a problem then they might as well add code to work around it. Go to Bookmarks, Show All Bookmarks, to pop up a bookmark managment dialog. Then review the Import and Backup tab, Restore, and it should list a set of days of backups from which you can restore bookmarks. (These are actually json files in the .mozilla/firefox directory in your $HOME.) The rest of your history is stored in sqlite files. I have fished through them at various times. The point of all of this is that I have seen Firefox get very confused due to problems with the state of the .mozilla files. Never with my own desktop but routinely at a site with a substandard NFS mounted home directory environment. In order to recover there I often shutdown firefox, move their entire .mozilla directory out of the way, and then copy the bookmarks directory back, then start firefox back up again and restore the bookmarks. That has always worked and gets people running again with all of their bookmarks. Most of them don't care about their form history. I would imagine that it would be possible to carefully restore the sqlite files too. Just an idea for you. YMMV and all of that. > (Ok, I'm using iron, which is not a debian pkg, but our chromium is > very old and out of date. Midori, arora, kazehake, and every other > browser we have in repos suck. Iceape is working, and I may use that, > but still, prefer my iceweasel). I am a big advocate of http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze backport for stable. 14.0.1-1~bpo60+1 is current there as of today and that is the same as the mozilla.org upstream. > That's the weird part. > I run htop. It will say, with iceweasel running, that I'm still only > using like 1 or 2% cpu and 2 to 4 % ram. Recently there was a kernel semaphore lockfile interaction that could be seen in firefox and other programs. You might want to check that you have the kernel upgrades appropriate for your release. If they are mismatched it is possible that might cause you a similar problem. Don't know but seems like a good thing to verify. > It was, in fact, until this recent matter. > A friend tells me he also is having similar issues, with iceweasel 14, > and they only started after a reboot. > Iceweasel was last updated sometime last week, I believe, when I ran > updates. I had not rebooted (generally don't) until Saturday, and then > this started, after the reboot. See that sounds similar to the recent kernel semaphore issue. But perhaps in reverse. Don't know. But this is the one I am talking about. https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/1/11 Not saying that is your problem. Just something I would verify that you have the appropriate kernel and userland. This is all old news now that a month has passed and I am not seeing this problem anywhere with the stock packages. But working fine and then not after a reboot sounds like a potentially similar issue. Bob
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