NetBSD 1.3.1 has been doing odd things to my files; normal happy everyday
files keep mutating into devices and other such things. For example,
on 5June98 I got the following in the daily insecurity report:

----
 Checking setuid files and devices:
 Setuid deletions:
 -r-sr-xr-x 2 root bin 24576 Mar 14 13:46:02 1998 /usr/bin/passwd
 -r-sr-xr-x 2 root bin 24576 Mar 14 13:46:02 1998 /usr/bin/yppasswd
 [...]
 Device additions:
 br-S--S--- 512 root 1792 56, 0 Oct 1 17:26:24 1975 /usr/bin/passwd
 br-S--S--- 512 root 1792 56, 0 Oct 1 17:26:24 1975 /usr/bin/yppasswd
----

When I checked /usr/bin, there were a bunch more files which had suffered a
similar fate, so I went and reinstalled all the /usr/bin stuff from the
appropriate tarballs. Now today, more weirdness has occurred:

----
 Checking setuid files and devices:
 Setuid/device find errors:

 ls: /etc/aliases.db: Invalid argument

 ls: /etc/ld.so.conf: Invalid argument

 Setuid additions:
 l-----S--- 256 root wheel 8388661 Feb 15 00:46:22 2024 /etc/aliases.db
 l-----S--- 256 root wheel 10037 Feb 19 20:06:39 2033 /etc/ld.so.conf
 [...]
 Device additions:
 c-----S--- 256 768 1792 222, 0 Feb 14 08:56:16 1978
 /usr/X11R6/include/X11/extensions/lbxzlib.h
 c-----S--- 256 768 1792 176, 0 Feb 14 07:26:40 1978
 /usr/X11R6/include/X11/extensions/multibuf.h
 [Another dozen or so .h files from this dir]
 c-----S--- 256 768 1792 8, 0 Feb 14 04:36:00 1978
 /usr/X11R6/include/X11/keysym.h
 c-----S--- 256 768 1792 32, 0 Feb 14 04:36:00 1978
 /usr/X11R6/include/X11/keysymdef.h
----

Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? It happened to me on 1.3
before I upgraded to 1.3.1 and then again when I initially installed 1.3.1,
but I thought that was do to bad blocks on my drive since I got an error
message about bad blocks doing an rm. I did a low-level format with Anubis
and told it to go around verifying everything and marking bad spots before
this latest install, so unless the drive is just gradually dying that
shouldn't be the problem. System is a IIci running NetBSD 1.3.1 GENERIC w/
32MB RAM and a 258 MB drive partitioned about 20 MacOS, 16 swap, rest
Root&Usr.

Dave Schmitt <dschmi1@umbc.edu>