Vital files suddenly corrupt, causing Kernel Panic

From: Geir (news_at_neverwhere.ws)
Date: 04/29/04 

Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 14:31:10 GMT

Hi,
We had a little problem on one of our workstations the other day.
When trying to shutdown the computer from the entry in the menu, GNOME
responded with "Cannot exec" instead of shutting down. Pressed
ctrl-alt-f1 to get a teminal outside of GNOME, logged on as root and
tried "/sbin/shutdown -h now". System responded that the file did not
exist.
A quick inspection showed that tthe file did indeed exist, but the
particular file and a few other in the /sbin directory had a brand
new timestamp, April 27 (the day this occured). As the system was
installed some time in February I believe these files should have a
timestamp from that time.

The creative person working on the system at the time managed to get
it back up and running again by copying the seemingly corrupt files
from one of the other systems running the same configuration.

/sbin/init
/sbin/killall5
/sbin/halt
/sbin/runlevel
/sbin/shutdown
/sbin/sulogin

The person operating the system at the time was not logged in as root
(as he is very aware that this would be a generally bad Idea).
The system seems to be working ok now, so the big question is what on
earth could cause this to happen?

Any ideas?

The system runs RHEL 3.0.

Regards
Geir

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