Why debsums is your friend

I've recently had troubles with my server. It doesn't hold anything public, but helps me synchronise my data between my working place and home, and serves as a place to save sensitive data (though not the only place). I had serious random crashes, ending up in the server not being able to hold for more than a few minutes alive. Whoah !

I wrote a small script to get the output of sensors and other various data, and I was surprised to see that after a while, it began segfaulting... Quick investigation with gdb showed the culprit to reside in libc6-i686... Funny thing, reportbug also showed the exact same segmentation fault. There you go. I therefore installed debsums, checked the library, and bingo !

vincent@server:~$ debsums libc6-i686
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/ld-2.3.6.so                                                OK
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libanl-2.3.6.so                                            OK
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libBrokenLocale-2.3.6.so                                   OK
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.3.6.so                                          FAILED

There was a checksum mismatch there... I reinstalled the library, and everything appears to work fine. But, that doesn't explain yet the crashes. I'm just afraid that my hard drives are slowly giving way, which would be very disappointing provided that they are brand new (6 month !) and not heavily used (though, maybe, in a warm environment). I'll check that later on.