Re: PROBLEM: Letters mysterously changing from a to e.

David Schleef (ds@stm.lbl.gov)
Wed, 3 Mar 1999 15:12:08 -0800


It's probably a memory, disk, or disk subsystem problem. Bit #2
in your a's and p's are getting set, giving e's and t's. I had
a similar problem with letters getting capitalized (bit #5 getting
cleared) that resulted in massive disk corruption. I decided
it was either a cabling problem or because I had the disk installed
upside-down (label side down). Replacing the cable and reinstalling
the disk fixed the problem. I've been running other drives
label-side down with no problem.

a = 0b01100001
e = 0b01100101
p = 0b01110000
t = 0b01110100

You probably only notice these, since 1->5 transpositions would
not cause errors... (ick)

dave...

On Wed, Mar 03, 1999 at 04:11:01PM -0600, Morgul Nazgul wrote:
>
> I am not sure if this is a problem with the kernel, the editor I am
> using, or maybe it is just a hardware problem. However, this problem did
> not show up until I upgraded to 2.2.0 from 2.0.34. Here is the situation,
> I spend about 6+ hours a day writting a MUD. I find a bug or something
> that needs to be changed so I go and edit the file and recompile the
> program. Once in a while the compiler will stop and give me an error that
> there is an undefined variable. The strange thing is it can even be in a
> file that has not been changed for days. The variable is defined, under a
> different name and what happens is an 'a' gets changed to an 'e'. At
> first, I noticed it when I was really tired so I attributed it to that.
> However, since I upgraded from 2.0.34, I this is happend atleast 20 times.
> A couple of them could be from a legitament typo I made, however it
> consitantly happens. One time a 'p' was changed to a 't', this could have
> been my mistake and since it has not happend again it probably was but Im
> not sure how. It is alsoways the lower case 'a' and it only happens one
> time per file. A couple of times it has happened twice in a row. I would
> fix it in one file and then another file, which compiled fine 15minutes
> prior and not touched, has the a to e problem. I will try rebooting with
> a 2.0.34 kernel later tonight. I am using a standard slackware 3.5
> installation from the infomagic June 1998 s6-cd developer resource set.
>

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