Re: Commands failing silently?

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Bill Campbell wrote:
On Mon, Mar 24, 2008, Dan Bongert wrote:
Hello all:

I have a couple CentOS 4 servers (all up-to-date) that are having strange command failures. I first noticed this with a perl script that uses lots of system calls.

Basically, sometimes a command just won't run:

thoth(52) /tmp> ls

...
thoth(66) /tmp> uname -a
Linux thoth.ssc.wisc.edu 2.6.9-67.0.7.ELsmp #1 SMP Sat Mar 15 06:54:55 EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Nothing in either dmesg or /var/log/messages seems to indicate any problems. It also doesn't seem to matter what the command is -- ls is the quickest test, but sshd will sometimes to fail to spawn children, etc. There aren't a large amount of processes on the machine either -- only 122 at the moment.

There is a very good chance that the machine has been cracked,
and the system's /bin/ls routine replaced by one hacked to hide
the cracker's programs.  ``rpm -V coreutils procps util-linux''
may well show several critical programs changed.

Everything seems OK there:


thoth(96) /tmp> sudo rpm -V coreutils procps util-linux

You can also try running ``strace /bin/ls'' to see what is going on.

Funnily enough, running strace will work just fine. Though, as I said, just
about any command will fail -- 'ls' was just for testing purposes.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

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Dan Bongert                     dbongert@xxxxxxxx

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