Getting Frustrated fast...

Mike (mcumings@ecst.csuchico.edu)
Sun, 17 Nov 1996 00:50:26 -0800 (PST)


Okay, I've mailed to the list a few times giving info on my
ret_from_sys_call GPF. Yesterday, after a random amount of time
ps decided to start seg faulting on me. I rebooted and everything
was fine, minus having to delete the core files it left behind. I
then proceeded to call a friend who, before my mention of my
problem, told me that he needed to reboot due to a seg faulting ps.
We laughed at this and continued on... Today, I turned on my
computer, happy as a clam... I logged in as root to do a little
maintenance work and I see a message telling me that root has new
email. Upon reading the email, I find that for some reason
cron couldnt write to /var/tmp. Just to make sure I didnt mis-read
what the email had said, I went to go check on the status of
/var/tmp, thinking that for some reason it may have accidentally been
removed. When I arrive in /var I typed ls, only to find that
tmp is a character device owned by user 34000 something in group
48000 something, and the mode flags are essentially random. Being
root I naturally tried to delete this messed up file, and then got
a "Operation not permitted" error! I am ROOT! I should be god of
my own computer! I then proceeded to add a user of the correct UID
and GID to try and remove the file, and then got "Permission Denied".
Starting to fear for my life I rebooted the computer... The most
stupid thing I could have done, because I am now in Windows thanks
to a kernel panic that is keeping me out of my system. I went to
go use my boot disk, and found out that Redhat no longer has
mount on their boot disk. How they pulled that off I would like
to know, but I am left locked out of my system with the grim
possibility that I will have to reinstall and wax everything on my
hd. Please dont take this email the wrong way... I appreciate
every effort those who work on the kernel are putting into their
projects, and I must say beforehand that this email has been highly
motivated by pure frustration, but why is so much time being put
into 2.1.x when 2.0.x is not even stable? From what I hear,
quite a few people are having my same GPF problem when away from
the keyboard, ps dies on every system I know that runs 2.0.x,
and then my kernel decides to re-create a random device from a
directory and wont let me fix it?

Please pardon my anger,
Mike (mcumings@ecst.csuchico.edu)