Segmentation faults & core dumps- su, mutt, vim, skill... won't run

[Colin Leath <cleath_(_at_)_experienceartist_(_dot_)_org>]

I'm running openbsd 2.7 with no local users but me, root, & system
accounts. Dmesg is at the end of this message.

I woke up this morning to find the hard drive of my server churning for no
apparent reason.

* Opening pine gave strange error messages like 'message X has UID Y less
than Z', as well as complaints about headers, and messages that when
opened were just garbage.

* I began by attempting to kill off unneeded processes, and found su
exited with a segmentation fault. So did mutt and skill. Vim would try to
exit, but had to be killed manually.

* man -k segmentation gave only about 10 "apropos line too long" messages
and nothing else. Other keywords seemed to work as one would expect.

* Note that lynx continued to work and apache appeared to be able to serve
web pages this whole time.

Then the hard drive stopped churning (after about 30 min to an hour), and
now everything appears to be back to normal. (man -k segmentation now
returns 'nothing appropriate') -- vim & vi still won't work.
Actually Vim exits with "Vim: Double signal, exiting"
vi will still give me a 'segmentation fault (core dumped)'


(1) How can I diagnose this problem? ps -axw & top showed nothing
appearing out of the ordinary.
My current hypothesis is that the 'make whatis' script was choking on a
bad portion of the harddrive and somehow got over it--but I saw no such
process running. Perhaps the harddrive problem is limited to one partition
and that is why some programs work and not others?

(2) Is there anything I should do beyond what the daily and weekly scripts
do to check the status of my harddrive?

Other than some lost email messages and lost time, there do not appear to
have been any other casualties, but that's probably because I don't know
where to look.


Is there any good reading on segmentation faults?


Thanks for any suggestions you might have,
Colin
cleath_(_at_)_experienceartist_(_dot_)_org

 6:23AM  up 71 days, 22:49, 11 users, load averages: 0.15, 0.13, 0.10

nction 0 "Intel 82371SB (Triton II) PCI-ISA" rev 0x01
pciide0 at pci0 dev 1 function 1 "Intel 82371SB (Triton II) IDE" rev 0x00: DMA, channel 0 wired to compatibility, channel 1 wired to compatibility
wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <QUANTUM BIGFOOT2550A>
wd0: can use 32-bit, PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2
wd0: 8-sector PIO, LBA, 2457MB, 4994 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 5033952 sectors
pciide0: channel 0 interrupting at irq 14
wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2 (using DMA data transfers)
"Intel 82371SB (Triton II) USB" rev 0x01 at pci0 dev 1 function 2 not configured
"S3 Trio32/64" rev 0x54 at pci0 dev 2 function 0 not configured
dc0 at pci0 dev 5 function 0 "Lite-On PNIC" rev 0x20: irq 11 address 00:c0:f0:59:4b:8b
ukphy0 at dc0 phy 1: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface
ukphy0: OUI 0x00c0b4, model 0x0000, rev. 8
isa0 at pcib0
isadma0 at isa0
sb0 at isa0 port 0x220/24 irq 5 drq 1: dsp v3.01
midi0 at sb0: <SB MIDI UART>
audio0 at sb0
opl0 at sb0: model OPL3
midi1 at opl0: <SB Yamaha OPL3>
pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61
midi2 at pcppi0: <PC speaker>
sysbeep0 at pcppi0
lpt0 at isa0 port 0x378/4 irq 7
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0/16: using exception 16
pccom0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
pccom1 at isa0 port 0x2f8/8 irq 3: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
vt0 at isa0 port 0x60/16 irq 1: vga 80 col, color, 8 scr, mf2-kbd
pms0 at vt0 irq 12
fdc0 at isa0 port 0x3f0/6 irq 6 drq 2
fd0 at fdc0 drive 0: 1.44MB 80 cyl, 2 head, 18 sec
biomask 4040 netmask 4840 ttymask 58c2
pctr: 586-class performance counters and user-level cycle counter enabled
dkcsum: wd0 matched BIOS disk 80
root on wd0a
rootdev=0x0 rrootdev=0x300 rawdev=0x302
syncing disks... done
rebooting...
OpenBSD 2.7 (GENERIC) #25: Sat May 13 18:04:26 MDT 2000
    deraadt_(_at_)_i386_(_dot_)_openbsd_(_dot_)_org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
cpu0: F00F bug workaround installed
cpu0: Intel Pentium (P54C) ("GenuineIntel" 586-class) 166 MHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8
real mem  = 32727040 (31960K)
avail mem = 25751552 (25148K)
using 425 buffers containing 1740800 bytes (1700K) of memory
mainbus0 (root)
bios0 at mainbus0: AT/286+(87) BIOS, date 07/22/97
apm0 at bios0apm0: APM power management enable: power management disabled (1)
: Power Management spec V1.1 (BIOS mgmt disabled)
apm0: AC on, battery charge unknown
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1 (bios)
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 "Intel 82437VX System (TVX)" rev 0x01
pcib0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0 "Intel 82371SB (Triton II) PCI-ISA" rev 0x01
pciide0 at pci0 dev 1 function 1 "Intel 82371SB (Triton II) IDE" rev 0x00: DMA, channel 0 wired to compatibility, channel 1 wired to compatibility
wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <QUANTUM BIGFOOT2550A>
wd0: can use 32-bit, PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2
wd0: 8-sector PIO, LBA, 2457MB, 4994 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 5033952 sectors
pciide0: channel 0 interrupting at irq 14
wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2 (using DMA data transfers)
"Intel 82371SB (Triton II) USB" rev 0x01 at pci0 dev 1 function 2 not configured
"S3 Trio32/64" rev 0x54 at pci0 dev 2 function 0 not configured
dc0 at pci0 dev 5 function 0 "Lite-On PNIC" rev 0x20: irq 11 address 00:c0:f0:59:4b:8b
ukphy0 at dc0 phy 1: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface
ukphy0: OUI 0x00c0b4, model 0x0000, rev. 8
isa0 at pcib0
isadma0 at isa0
sb0 at isa0 port 0x220/24 irq 5 drq 1: dsp v3.01
midi0 at sb0: <SB MIDI UART>
audio0 at sb0
opl0 at sb0: model OPL3
midi1 at opl0: <SB Yamaha OPL3>
pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61
midi2 at pcppi0: <PC speaker>
sysbeep0 at pcppi0
lpt0 at isa0 port 0x378/4 irq 7
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0/16: using exception 16
pccom0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
pccom1 at isa0 port 0x2f8/8 irq 3: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
vt0 at isa0 port 0x60/16 irq 1: vga 80 col, color, 8 scr, mf2-kbd
pms0 at vt0 irq 12
fdc0 at isa0 port 0x3f0/6 irq 6 drq 2
fd0 at fdc0 drive 0: 1.44MB 80 cyl, 2 head, 18 sec
biomask 4040 netmask 4840 ttymask 58c2
pctr: 586-class performance counters and user-level cycle counter enabled
dkcsum: wd0 matched BIOS disk 80
root on wd0a
rootdev=0x0 rrootdev=0x300 rawdev=0x302
pcvt: kbd led cmd not ack'd (resp 0xfe 0xfe)
pcvt: kbd led cmd not ack'd (resp 0xfa 0xfe)