dear list, Last night I had a weird problem with my SuSE-7.0 box, which I have had several times before, also on other machines and other SuSE versions. Because everytime it happened it was on a machine that was at the moment in the internet, and had been for at least a few hours. I've never had it with machines that were not currently reachable from the internet. I am wondering if it might be a symptom of a break-in. This is what happens: suddenly a number of programs I had running died mysteriously as soon as I clicked my mouse anywhere in them (netscape, xemacs, etc.) Also I was completely unable to start a lot of programs. I could use who ps, lsof, iptraf, etc. But I could not start ssh, telnet, netscape, ftp, lynx. I could start jed, but not emacs. I could start pine, but not pico (pine died too as soon as I chose "compose message"). Mathematica worked, but R failed... I looked for patterns in which programs worked and which didn't. Maybe only large programs died? Or only network-based? Or only those using a particular library? Also it happens on machines permanently in the net via ethernet, on machione I only use for dialup occasionally... several architectures, several kernel versions, nothing (as far as I could find) in common, except for the same symptoms, and the fact that it happens only on machines that are at that very moment. Does anyone have an idea what could cause this, or at least if it means the systems are compromised? Thanks, Yuri. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- drs. Yuri Robbers phone : +31-71-527-4966 Leiden University fax : +31-71-527-4900 Institute for Theoretical Biology email : robbers@rulsfb.leidenuniv.nl Kaiserstraat 63 2311 GP Leiden PGP 5.0 public key available: the Netherlands Check your favourite hkp server. --------------------------------------------------------------------------