Last Saturday #mrtg (why mrtg? That's a topic for another post) started to #segfault.

It was very reproducible. Running with --debug=THINGs showed, that it crashed after reading the config file. I had assumed, that it was due to some corrupt data files. Because at the same time I had some issues with some of the data sources. Running gdb on perl (mrtg is written in perl), did not seem like a good idea at all.

Today I rebooted my machine, because I wanted to switch to 3.13 from debian/stable/backports. And funnily enough, mrtg just worked again. My first thought was "Is this windows, eh?", second though was "Hmm, I don't know about any runtime crap, that I did not clean up during reproducing the segfault". And finally ended up with "Okay, it's like windows, and I don't understand it".

In the evening @joar told me about cosmic rays. It did not occur to me to run debsums on my box, or clear the cache. I should have done it. Full Stop.