[jddunlap]

I installed CentOS 5.1 x86_64 a while ago and everything ran rock solid. A month or two ago I ran a yum update that looked a little odd at the time because there were several hundred updates, which is very unusual CentOS. What I figured out a day or two later is that that yum upgraded me from CentOS 5.1 to 5.2. The CentOS mirrors use what appears to be a symbolic link from "5" to the most recent CentOS release (5.0, 5.1, 5.2, etc). This isn't a problem in and of itself. However, the value of $releaseserver in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo is simply "5" regardless of whether you're running 5.0, 5.1, or 5.2. So after 5.2 synch'd with the mirrors, "5" now pointed to 5.2 not 5.1. Then when I ran yum update it apparently upgraded me to CentOS 5.2.

Ever since then, my computer hangs after I leave it on for a few days. Today was the last straw. I had to hard boot the machine because it was non-responsive and that caused file system errors. I was able to get the system back online by running fsck. Thankfully, the operating system is on it's own physical drive and my data is on a software raid 5 array, which appears undamaged at this point. It didn't even rebuild itself after the reboot.

There was surprisingly very little to be found in the logs. However, I did find these in /var/log/messages but I'm not even sure they are related.
messages:Jul 13 06:59:04 localhost kernel: crashreporter[12537]: segfault at 00000000f7c0d625 rip 00000000f7c0d625 rsp 00000000ffa18fac error 14
messages.1:Jul 12 22:32:50 localhost kernel: crashreporter[7731]: segfault at 00000000f7cbe625 rip 00000000f7cbe625 rsp 00000000ffac8d7c error 14
messages.3:Jun 28 12:01:25 localhost kernel: crashreporter[6494]: segfault at 00000000f7cf3625 rip 00000000f7cf3625 rsp 00000000ffff839c error 14

I do have a 3.9G file called /var/crash/2008-05-09-10:59/vmcore but it's a binary and I don't know what to make of it.

If I don't find the problem soon I'm just going to do a fresh install on the operating system's drive and re-mount my raid array.

I guess the moral of the story is to edit /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and tack your minor version number on the end of $releaseserver to stop this from happening...

Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.