Spontaneous permission change?

[Mike]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2007, Manuel Arostegui Ramirez wrote:

> El Domingo, 21 de Enero de 2007 07:48, Tim escribió:
>> On Sat, 2007-01-20 at 14:19 -0700, Mike wrote:
>>> All of a sudden most of the scripts in my bin directory under my home
>>> directory are no longer executable or otherwise have permissions
>>> mangled.  I don't have any clue how this happened!?!?
>>
>> The usual cause would be the user using the chmod command with wildcards
>> that weren't too well looked at, or while in the wrong directory.
>>
>
> Just a suggestion, you could use Babel Enterprise:
> http://babel.sourceforge.net/en/index.php
> And keep your boxes totally under control, I mean, you will be able to notice
> when and where permissions have been changed, even more, you will be able to
> realised if your perm have been set correctly, talking about security, of
> course.
> Hope this helps.
>

None of the scripts that I've authored have chmod in them at all. 
Although I won't totally dismiss a scripting error I think it's very 
unlikely.  I grep'd history just to make sure my mind wasn't failing me, 
no chmod done on the command line in the last 2000...  This is bizarre...

Thanks for the link to Babel, looks like a great tool.

I did find the message below in var/log/messges.  This ocurred about three 
hours after I found the permission changes.  Could a kernel bug change 
permissions in one directory like I'm seeing?

Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel: BUG: spinlock bad magic on CPU#0, kswapd0/140 (Not tainted)
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  lock: ca8da978, .magic: cead4ead, .owner: <none>/-1, .owner_cpu: -1
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c0403f28>] dump_trace+0x69/0x1af
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c0404086>] show_trace_log_lvl+0x18/0x2c
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c0404601>] show_trace+0xf/0x11
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c040468b>] dump_stack+0x15/0x17
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c04d5359>] _raw_spin_lock+0x1a/0xdc
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c0471eb8>] prune_dcache+0x7f/0x119
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c0471f68>] shrink_dcache_memory+0x16/0x2d
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c044a501>] shrink_slab+0xd9/0x12e
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c044a85f>] kswapd+0x28d/0x36d
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c042b1a5>] kthread+0xad/0xd8
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  [<c0403adf>] kernel_thread_helper+0x7/0x10
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel: DWARF2 unwinder stuck at kernel_thread_helper+0x7/0x10
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel: Leftover inexact backtrace:
Jan 20 12:04:48 walnut kernel:  =======================