[ILUG] puzzle of the day: RHEL has files seemingly undoing edits

[Brendan Kehoe]

Many thanks for all the ideas!

I spoke with him for a bit, and learned:

- his logs show only:

    Feb 12 14:16:17 localhost smartd[3375]: Device: /dev/sda, 194 
Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
    Feb 12 14:16:17 localhost smartd[3375]: Device: /dev/sda, 194 
Offline uncorrectable sectors

  I've suggested he get the disk vendor's diagnostic program to figure 
out if it's a low-level hardware problem.

- It's a normal single disk set up with / as an ext3 partition under 
LVM, and its first partition also ext3 as /boot.  I'm trying to dig up 
anything interesting about LVM doing weird things with disk writes and 
the like.

- It happens with some files and not others.  He can't do anything to 
make it happen deliberately.

- He's going to call me back in a bit to let me know if the timestamp 
changes and if he saw any crontab entries that he doesn't understand.

Thanks for the help!
B