Corrupted modprobe.conf file

[cmcveigh at adelphia.net]

On Wed, 2005-08-03 at 21:07 -0400, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 08:56:11PM -0400, cmcveigh at adelphia.net wrote:
>  > I am running FC3 on an IBM T42 laptop.  Early this morning I was running
>  > system-config-network to change some network settings.  The system-
>  > config-network app became very erratic in it behavior so I had to kill
>  > its process.  I next rebooted my machine (normaly less that a 1 minute
>  > process) and it took 19 minutes to reboot.
> 
> Where was it spending most of its time ?
> 
>  > After many hours of
>  > searching I found that I had a corrupted /etc/modprobe.conf file.  I was
>  > 185 MB in size and full of gibberish.
> 
> *wow*. That's disturbing.
> If you can repeat this, please file a bug against system-config-network
> 
>  > My question is how can I regenerate a correct modprobe.conf file for my
>  > machine?  Can I simply reinstall the package that creates it?  (rpm -q
>  > --whatprovides /etc/modprobe.conf does not return anything), Are there
>  > scripts in place that recreate the file? (I did try
>  > running /sbin/generate-modprobe.conf but all it seems to want to do is
>  > convert a modules.conf  file to a modprobe.conf file).
> 
> rm -f /etc/modprobe.conf
> rm -f /etc/sysconfig/hwconf
> kudzu
> 
> should get you a recreated modprobe.conf

> 		Dave
> 
> 

Dave, thanks for the reply - the three recommended commands did the
trick and all seems to be normal with my laptop now.  You definitely
make my hero of the week club.

As to reproducing the problem I have not had any luck. Based upon other
posts in this thread it does seem to be a problem that has affected
other Fedora users.  My guess is some sort of race condition exists in
the system-config-tools that can result destruction of the modprobe.conf
file.  I will continue to try to reproduce and will post if I am
successful. 

As to where my machine was spending its time during the boot process I
am not sure; however once the machine was up, using system-config-
network was useless.  Using both top and system monitor the system would
use 50-80% of the cpu  and virtually all RAM and Swap space.  After
about 6-7 minutes that system-configure-network display would show up on
the screen.  Any changes or modifications to the network that required
saving of the configuration would then take the same 6-7 minutes and the
same cpu, RAM and swap conditions as above. 

I still have the corrupted modeprobe.conf file but I am not sure if I
need to submit a bug report without being able to re-create.