Today, I found this in the mail. I’m not sure if I should keep this kernel (it’s a stock Debian kernel: linux-image-2.6.26-2-vserver-amd64, 2.6.26-15). Google does not give any results, seems like a corruption of log messages.

Oct  8 03:32:08 hoshi kernel: [145430.434977]kjoradsatn. omtitra  eod

edit: Oct 9
Today, I got this one, this is getting scary:

Oct  9 03:32:08 hoshi kernel: >99873]koradsatn. omtitra  eod

The only link I could find was this one: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-245137-start-0.html But it does not help me a lot.

When comparing the output of dmesg to the one in /var/log/kern.log (which is the source of the garbled messages), the only thing that is missing in the kern.log is this:

[236989.877537] kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds

It looks like this is the source from the garbled message: If you start from ‘k’ and take only every other character, you’ll see. So apparently, this is not a kernel problem (because the message appears ungarbled in dmesg) but rather a problem with syslogd.

Now things get really strange, as I have an rsyslogd daemon running, but I could not find the binary on the disk. It seems that I accidentally started a syslog daemon in a chroot (I did play around with that certain chroot, because I was fixing a computer that was booting via nfs-root from this machine).

The funny thing is that the rsyslogd that was running, was actually a 32-bit executable (the nfsroot is a 32-bits install), while the host is a 64-bit system. So I’ve been running a 32-bit syslogd on a 64-bit for two days :)

I’ll see if I get another garbled message tomorrow, but I think the problem is solved now :)