all links vanished

From: chris Günther (christian.guenther_at_amaxa.com)
Date: 10/27/03 

Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 12:48:00 +0100

Dear list,

A couple of days ago something REALLY STRANGE happened to
one of my RedHat 9 Servers. From one moment to another all
- and I really mean all - links from within my /usr partition
were deleted!

I can't say to the minute as to when this happenend, but I
know that when one of my users called and said he could not
log on to the fileserver anymore and I then tried to connect
I got a fierce segmentation fault doing ps aucx. I had to
reset the machine the hard way and after that reset it never
came up again. I have to say, that around the time the user
called I did run an up2date -u but that said everything where
up to date and therefor did not do anything.

I tried a lot of things out and eventually found out that all
the links in my user-Partition and all the links under /lib
where virtually gone.

Did anybody ever experience something like this??? And, if
someone did, can you tell me how this happenend? I have no
clue what might have caused all my symbolic links to simply
cease to exist while at the same time leaving every file in
order - down to the md5sum still being the same compared to
the last tripwire run.

Greets and many, many, many thanks in advance,

        chris