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Description of problem: I ran yum update on Fedora 11 in my office yesterday. Upon reboot, the machine would lock. Some symptoms were that it appeared to freeze after initialising Cobbler but befroe "Local" came up on scren. Switching to interactive mode, I would try to skip these but to no avail. It seemed to be be locking on trying to reach gdm. Switching to init level 3, I could boot but discovered /var/logs no longer existed. This may be why gdm failed; it was trying to write to /var/log. Could also be the problem with cobbler, etc. Also, from init level 3, manually attempting to run startx failed. Linker reported problems as well. This morning, another employee tried the same thing from a freshly installed Fedora. Again, the machine ran fine until he rebooted after the yum update. Another symptom is that, on dual screen computers, one screen will show a lot of snow. This is during the attempt to boot via Plymouth, before reaching gdm. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedoar 11 - yum update on morning of 14/09/2009 (Australian time.) How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Fedora 2. Run yum update. 3. Reboot Actual results: Cannot boot. Major system corruption as discussed above. Expected results: Stable system with updates applied. Additional info: As I have now reinstalled Fedora, I have not preserved any data. Also, var/log was destroyed, as noted, so not much information from there. As it has happened to two people in this office it may be widespread.
Just to clarify, it was only when I rebooted that the problems became apparent. I hadn't rebooted for the previous six days but I had been running yum update regularly. It appears, therefore, to have been one of the updates that occurred sometime between Thursday and Monday (in Australia) that caused this issue.
If /var/log can vanish, then it seems to be a security breach.
Where, exactly, would this security breach have occurred, ie, in the RH Brisbane office, where two machines have been affected, (one of which was a fresh install with yum updates immediately applied) or to the packages on the yum repo server itself, which would obviously have much graver consequences for customers?
Not the yum repo servers. I never had any problems and nobody else has reported such a problem. Try checking with rkhunter and the other forensic stuff as is appropriate.
Were you also using hibernation?
No, neither myself nor the other person who had the same issue were using hibernation functionality.
I'm experiencing the same bug in FEDORA 12. After some tryes, it's related with the kernel update : 2.6.32.10-90.fc12 I've provided additionnal dmesg and hardware information. See --> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=523344
ERRATUM : see bug 578422
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Fedora 11 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2010-06-25. Fedora 11 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.