Installed on identical machines, one has flaky programs
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Installed on identical machines, one has flaky programs
We just got two identical machines from Dell (without Windows!). I downloaded the .iso of Scientific Linux 5.2, a clone of RHEL 5.2, and burned a DVD. I installed both machines from this disk. I wouldn't swear that I installed exactly the same packages on both, but there's not much difference.
One machine was strange almost from the beginning. I tried to run system-config-services, but it crashed every time with a segfault. Rather than investigate, I just redid the installation. This time system-config-services works OK. Now whenever I try to run vi or vim in a gnome-terminal, the window crashes. There's no problem in a KDE Konsole window.
First I ran memtest86 to look for bad memory. No errors. Then I ran the Dell hard disk diagnostic. No errors. I ran the installation media test on the DVD on both computers. No errors.
Then I started looking at the installed files, particularly /usr/bin/gnome-terminal. It's not the same size on the two computers! The bad one has a smaller file. This looks like progress. Then I ran rpm -V on the gnome-terminal package and it passed on both machines. I don't understand that at all.
Then I went back to the installation disk. I ran rpm -qip --dump on the RPM package to see what gnome-terminal should look like. Neither the size nor the md5 checksum agrees with either of the installed gnome-terminal files. Both files are bigger than the size given in the RPM.
Looking a little farther, I checked /usr/bin/vim and the vim-enhanced package. The two installed files are the same size (rah!), but they are both a bit bigger than the RPM says. None of the md5 checksums agree.
Then I re-installed the gnome-terminal package from the DVD. The file is the same size and it still crashes.
What's going on here? Should I expect the checksums to match? Should the actual file size match what the RPM dump says? Is there a plausible explanation for how things got messed up?
Look at logs under /var/log, especially message, kernel.log, and syslog. Check the output of dmesg. If they're identical, then it is how they were installed or hardware.
The logs may show you things about the hardware that another diagnostic won't. And yes, this sounds like hardware.
If one system works, then it is probably not due to your media; else there would be other problems.
If the numbers are different on each machine, then you don't have the same packages. You can use rpm to sanity check the packages on the 'dodgy' host, it'll take some time to do them all, but it might help.
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