so question..


i was just screwing around with the DU command and ran this

To which i got alot of things that i expected (it is a fileserver afterall), but i also got a could of weird hits in my /var/lock directory (look below).

server:var/lock# du -ah
210M ./cdrom.lock
2.1G ./floppy.lock
2.3G .


so i dont have a cdrom / floppy inserted into my machine... is it ok to just blow these lock files away? and how on earth did they get so big? i might have inserted one floppy in when installed the system ages ago ... that was also the last time it would have used a CD. Is this something a reboot would get rid of? is this just someone screwing with my system?



Thanks

On my Debian there are no files in /var/lock so its likely safe to remove them.

BEFORE you do that though you might want to try "file <filename>" to see what it thinks they are. If they are text or ascii you can do "more <filename>" to see the contents. If they're ELF binaries or data files you can try "strings <filename>" which isn't quite as helpful but scrolling through it may give you some clue as to what they are.

It might also be worthwhile to do "ls -l <filename>" to see if they are executable or worse yet setuid for root. Maybe they're trojans someone planted in this area where most people wouldn't look?