Help! Corrupted files???

From: Jeffrey J. Kosowsky (kosowsky_at_consult.pretender)
Date: 02/13/04 

Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 05:40:05 GMT

Running tripwire, I discovered that I have a couple of dozen newly
"corrupted" files. i.e. sometime in the last day several files seem to
have changed exhibiting *different* CRCs, MD5sums, inode numbers) but
*same* size and modify times.

This occured between daily runnings of tripwire. Running 'cmp -l'
against a backup copy of my drive confirms that each file has
differences in several thousand bytes.

I have *not* noticed any actual strange behaviors or crashes in
running these programs.

The only thing I can think of is that there were a number of updated
rpms for Fedora Core 1 that I updated that day, including:
        gnome-libs, libsndfile, mc, nss_ldap, pam_krb5, and pango.

Examples of "corrupted" files, include:
        /usr/sbin/xcdroast
        /usr/lib/evolution/1.4/libcamel.so.0.0.0
        /usr/lib/evolution/1.4/libebook.so.0.0.0
        ...

Not sure what the cause (and implications are)?

Virus/worm? (unlikely since 'chkrootkit' shows no problems and these
             don't seem to be the typical files to infect)

Disk error? (but disk seems otherwise healthy, no 'smartd' problems,
             plus why was inode number changed)

Side effect of rpm upgrades?
        (i.e. did any of the pre/post-installation scripts somehow
        affect the contents of files from *other* rpms)

In any case I am obviously concerned.

Jeff