You know it's time to re-install when...

[crackers]

grep throws a segfault.

I have absolutely no idea what happened, or when, but here I was crusing along on my upgrade from FC2 to FC3 - then I couldn't get to GMail. Then I was having problems with the Apple movie trailers site. So I started to go poking around /etc to see if I could find anything. Okay, let's grep for some stuff in /etc - segfault?!?!?!?! :eek:

*sigh*

Obviously, I'm back up and running fine with a fresh installation. This is why I keep /home on a separate partition. ;)

[piedamaro]

grep throws a segfault.

I have absolutely no idea what happened, or when, but here I was crusing along on my upgrade from FC2 to FC3 - then I couldn't get to GMail. Then I was having problems with the Apple movie trailers site. So I started to go poking around /etc to see if I could find anything. Okay, let's grep for some stuff in /etc - segfault?!?!?!?! :eek:

*sigh*

Obviously, I'm back up and running fine with a fresh installation. This is why I keep /home on a separate partition. ;)
I've suffered a similar issue: I had a lot of programs to segfault on startup, it turned to be a failed prelinking, running /etc/cron.daily/prelink again solved the issue.

[crackers]

Oh, crud. Good catch. Well, at least I have a cleaner system to mess up.

[imdeemvp]

It was reported days after the new released of fc3. But if you run your updates right away the bug was fixed: http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=27437&highlight=eggcups

[jtang613]

This is why I keep /home on a separate partition. ;)

I narrowly averted disaster today too. Been moving some hefty (GB+) files around on my /home partition when I began experiencing very strange behaviour ...
- File write failures
- Read failures
- ls: Failed. Input/Output Error

My entire /home partition began randomly locking up, despite reboots and /tmp clearing and "asking nicely".

So after some knuckle-cracking and head-banging I logged in as root. <cue ominous theme music>

I use the XFS (filesystem) for all my partitions, so my first task was to umount /home and run xfs_check /home. This revealed numerous "Bad magic number for inode" errors (about 30). Son-of-a-***** ! I gues there's a first for everything. Actually, I think this might stem from me accidentally tripping my powerbar when my PC was under heavy load a few days ago.

Anyway, my /home partition has a lot of stuff that I really need - and haven't yet backed up this week. So I then mounted /home and ran xfsdump -f /mnt/store /home to backup all my valuebles before unmounting it again and running xfs_repair /dev/md2. This handy tool cleared up those gremlins in less than 2 minutes on my 80GB /home partition.

It was a big relief, so I just thought I'd share the drama.

ciao,
Jason

[Shadow Skill]

Hmm is this a trend? My startx and system-config-display magically disappeared yesterday..I ended up formatting / just before I read Crackers suggestion. Then Crackers himself ends up nuking his own / before reading about the prelink potential fix...Then you Tang today avoid disaster with your own system. I sense a pattern of great evil...

[crackers]

There's a vey large difference - i had interrupted a prelink run and had (apparently) some files that were only partially processed. This rendered the whole system basically unstable. I'm actually quite glad I did do the re-install: I had some pretty crusty old config files that were so heavily modified I couldn't tell which way was up in them any more. I look more upon it as a needed spring cleaning - although a bit early in my case.

[Jman]

Hopefully the retweaking of those config files won't take too long. That and installing all the random software I have is why I'm not too keen on reinstalling.

[crackers]

Actually, the reason the configs have been tweaked so much was to make them work from upgrade to upgrade. "Fixing" the few I needed to after the install took about 5 minutes. And 90% of the "random software" I install these days ends up in /opt. My usual problem is getting rid of the extra packages that I don't use. (Don't ask me why, it's an old habit from when disks were about 1/1000th the size they are now.)