[Bug 828437] [NEW] chkrootkit cron job went nuts, spawned 14 instances and consumed nearly 90% of my ram

[Jeff Lane]

Public bug reported:

Walked away for a while and returned to find my system almost unusable.
Something was causing the DISK I/O to go through the roof, the system
constantly waiting, making it, as I said, almost unusable.

On some investigation, top indicated that egrep was consuming 6.7 GB of
actual memory (of 8 GB total system RAM).  Looking at the output of 'ps
axf' showed 14 instances of chkrootkit and egrep's

My system being DOS'd locally by chkrootkit... the irony is not lost on
me.

No idea why this happened, or even where to start wtih it, but I thought
I'd at least open a bug and report what I could... but I had to reboot
the system the hard way before I could even do that.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: chkrootkit 0.49-4ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-10.46-generic 2.6.38.7
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-10-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Aug 17 20:34:52 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: chkrootkit
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-06-03 (75 days ago)

** Affects: chkrootkit (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: amd64 apport-bug natty running-unity

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Title:
  chkrootkit cron job went nuts, spawned 14 instances and consumed
  nearly 90% of my ram

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