Re: "make check" may have trashed my system

[Eric Siegerman]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 02:05:55PM -0400, Paul J. Menchini wrote:
> >> From: "Paul J. Menchini" <address@hidden>
> >> Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 12:50:26 -0400 (EDT)
>
> >> I discovered that every non-directory file in
> >> / was gone; in particular, the symbolic links /bin, /lib, and /sys
> >> [plus others]
> 
> Ok, I've now run the tests from a non-priviledged account, using trace.
> I've had a quick look through the log file, but can't find anything
> suspicious.  Can you suggest anything I should look for?

unlink() calls, of course (duh).  But also stat() calls on "/"
(also the other system calls in the stat family, plus access()).
This is in case the code is checking whether "/" is writable
before calling unlink().

If you have a disposable system of the same type as the one that
got trashed (same architecture, same O/S version, symlinks in the
same places, etc.), it would be interesting to try it as root
again, just to make sure it really was that "make check" that
caused the problem.  It'd be a pain to spend a lot of time on a
wild goose chase after auto* bugs, if it turned out it was
something else entirely that originally trashed your machine.

But ONLY if you have a disposable system -- I'm not for a moment
suggesting that you try it again on your server!  (I for one
wouldn't be brave enough to try it even in a chroot jail on a
production machine.)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea.
        - RFC 1925 (quoting an unnamed source)