Whats with this icon?

[Crewchief]

I'm running RH 6.1 and when I startx and the desktop loads I get an icon that looks like a sick yellow time bomb that says root under it.

What's with that?

[Crewchief]

Sorry it says core under it. Gnome desktop.

[DMR]

That's the graphical representation of a "core dump", welcome to UNIX! From O'Reilly's FAQ section: Question: What good is a core file?

Answer: Core files are what are created when a program terminates prematurely and "dump's core". Core is the program's information in memory written to your hard disk. You can examine it for details on why your program
terminated.In other words, when one of your programs chokes, the last thing it tries to do before dying is to flush any information it has in memory to a file, in hopes that debugging wizards can then examine the file to trace the cause of the program's (abnormal) termination. The last time you ran X, a program probably did just that. It happens once in a while, and unless you're into some deep debugging forensics, you can delete it safely. If it happens consistently, you have a problem that needs to be sorted out.

[ 14 June 2001: Message edited by: DMR ]

[bdl]

It's just a coredump; something under gnome most likely went haywire and dumped core. This little "bomb file" is evidence if it and used by programmers to help debug the software. You can delete the file if you wish.

[Crewchief]

Well lets see. Its a fresh install and I was playing around with IPchains(rc.firewall and rc.local. found a bunch of typo'sreal fat fingers). I fixed the typo's and deleted the file and rebooted. Core dump gone for now.

[DMR]

Congrats, if the core dumps don't start reoccuring immediately, you've probably found the cause. :)

[lsibn]

A less elegant (although may be better if you don't plan to submit bug reports) solution would be to call `ulimit -c 0` in .bash_profile (or .profile in some dists) to disable core dumps altogether. If you do this, the largest core file that will be allowed is 0 bytes (i.e., core does not get dumped).

[Crewchief]

Thanks guys, I think I'll leave the the core dump in place... It lets me know when I've f$*cked up. After fixing the other files I noticed that that eth0 failed on boot. Got that fixed.

Maybe I should quite spinning my wheels and ask. I plan to stick this box in the DMZ then to a router(netgear) from there to the other systems on the network. For now I have the hardware set up as.

1 cable modem
2 router
3 hub to my linux box and triple boot system.
Now the linux box will be before the cable modem then the router, hub will be out of the pic, then to the systems. At this moment the cable modem is dhcp but that will change. The question that I ask is can I set up the linux box in ipchains to the triple boot system this way. This is only for testing at this time cause I know it will work with the linux box at static ip then the router to the others on the network.