[gentoo-user] General weirdness - a tale of woe.

[Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk>]

Hello list,

Over the last few weeks I've been having odd things go bump in the night. This 
is a KDE amd64 system with /usr under / and no initrd.

The first thing was that my screen saver was being overlaid with a plain 
default desktop. That was fixed by creating a new user for myself and setting 
it up from scratch. Tedium galore, especially importing into KMail. Then I 
found KMail creating duplicates of existing e-mails. It would make a few when 
I started the program, then some more when I told it to fetch mail, and even 
more when I clicked into the folder containing the copies.

Several other little oddities were happening too, and I began to suspect my 
six-year-old disks. Well, I wanted to put some shiny new SSDs in anyway, so I 
used this as the excuse. That seemed to fix everything and I ran for a week or 
two in welcome peace.

Then this morning when I came back to the machine (it runs 24x7x52 running 
BOINC projects) the screen saver overlay was back. Then I noticed that the 
three Konsole windows I keep on one desktop had been resized one pixel 
smaller, so that the last line didn't fit. I'm particular about that (OCPD?) 
and would never have left it that way.

When I came to KMail I found that it wouldn't loop outside the current folder. 
I have it set to loop through all of them, so I changed it, restarted KMail, 
changed it back to loop through all folders and restarted KMail. It still 
wouldn't go outside the current folder. I also notice it's ignoring my one 
auto-correction setting - to capitalise the initial letter of a sentence.

So I ran an emerge -eK world and restarted. No change. Clearly something is 
changing in my home directory tree, but what? I can't keep on creating new 
user accounts.

The last thing is that at reboot the RAID-1 volume manager often fails to 
start. It says afterwards that it's running, but all the /dev/vg7/* are absent 
(that's where the logical volumes live). The file system root lives on /dev/md5 
with metadata < 1.0, while /dev/vg7 has metadata >1.0. The fact that it 
happens often but not always suggests a timing problem to me.

# rc-update -s -v | grep -e raid -e lvm
                  lvm | boot                                   
       lvm-monitoring |                                        
              lvmetad |                                        
               mdraid | boot                                   

(This reminds me that since the last update of lvm2 I haven't been able to 
work out how to set it up to cause no errors.)

Can anyone suggest a way to tackle all these? I'm puzzled in particular by the 
apparent consistency in symptoms, apart from the RAID problem which I think 
only became a nuisance after installing the SSDs. Gkrellm shows CPU temps of 
50 to 55C, which seems normal enough. Could I have something misconfigured in 
the kernel?

I'm reduced to making general arm-waving noises...

-- 
Rgds
Peter