General Protection Faults during Fedora 11 startup
 

That I even noticed this may make me sound like not a beginner, but I still think this question is appropriate for a beginner forum. The question is: why am I getting a General Protection fault in the logwatch every time I start Fedora?

The exact error message (found in mail logwatch sent to root) is:

WARNING: General Protection Faults in these executables
npviewer.bin : 2 Time(s)

What IS this npviewer, anyway? It doesn't show up in 'which npviewer.bin'.

NB: I have not changed the installation defaults for logwatch. Nor would I want to until I know what this message means;)

Searching LQ could yield results. Say http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi....-help-711097/. As you can see it has nothing to do with Logwatch which basically is a (set of) Perl script(s) ran by root for reporting. I'ts good you run it as long as you actually read the reports too.

More about npviwer.bin...
 

I did search LQ. I was not convinced that that result really answered my question. Especially since now I have removed the offending package (the one using npviewer.bin for Flash on non i386 Firefox), and npviewer.bin general protection faults STILL occur in logwatch files. But at least Firefox performance seems to have improved: I even no longer have the odd Firefox problem of mouse clicks causing the elevator bar to keep scrolling down to the bottom of the page.

Finally, reading logs is a lot easier if the logs are NOT stuffed to the gills with spurious error messages. This particular error message, though perhaps not entirely spurious, still sounds like mainly a distraction, with very little relevance.

If the problem was fixed and you run Logwatch with --range Yesterday or Today then these errors will eventually disappear from your Logwatch report, elif you run Logwatch with the archived logs switch (--range All) then they will keep appearing as long as they remain in logrotated logfiles.


Yes, that may be true but the fact of the matter is that the regular entries aren't interesting: errors are, because they allow you to take notice of and correct them.


GPFs, any other errors, are not the type of warning you should neglect investigating. If this is a default Fedora repo package you could for instance check the bug tracker and see if others experience it as well, elif it's a third party application (say Adobe) then you could file a bug report with them.

O...K..., but please recall: I didn't change the system default settings. So I am not the one who is running them. Worse yet, I find /etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf is empty (well, only comments), and the man page for logwatch does not SAY what the default for '--range' is.

May I assume that the line in the email to root labeled. "Date Ranged Processed:..." answers this question?

By "email to root", I refer to the emails with subject "Logwatch for <insert machine name here>"

It appears that the --range argument is 1 day, and I now can no longer find npviewer.bin with its general protection fault in the logs for Sep 22-28. So I am almost ready to mark this thread 'solved'.