I’ve just fixed the strangest computer problem I’ve come across in a while. (I say ‘I’, but David did most of the work)

Some time ago, I set up Linux on a computer for Mim, who was familiar with computers, but not a ‘haxx0r’. The system had been running quite happily, with yum automatically keeping everything up to date, and Open Office, Firefox and gaim supplying her computing needs.

On Friday evening though, the libc runtime system file became corrupted somehow and the kernel couldn’t access it on boot. It complained of an I/O error and so reported a panic. (I guess I’d panic too if someone had disabled something that crucial to my operation). On inspection, the libc file hadn’t been touched by any software and showed the same file attributes as when it was first put on the computer. The only possible conclusion was that the hard disk had dropped a byte or two and rendered the file unreadable.

Ah well, gave her an opportunity to upgrade her Fedora Core 3 system to Core 4. Everything appears to be working again now. 🙂