RH 5.1 question

[Helper Monkey <cbidler@talkware.net>]

Afriend of mine hit me with this question about a well-horked box at his job at UIUC.
It stumped me, so I thought I'd ask around and see if anybody has seen something
like it before.

> So, when we try to run passwd, we type in the changed password twice, and
> we get a "critical error- immediate abort" error. When we try useradd, we
> get a "unable to lock password file". So we deleted the etc/passwd.lock
> file- no dice. Also, when we try to edit etc/passwd using vi, we get a
> "error writing to swap file" error, but we're still able to modify the
> file. Also, when using the config manager in X, we're not able to "save"
> any new users or groups. We're using RedHat Linux 5.1 on a Gateway PII
> 400 with win95 on the other partitions.

I told him to double-check free space on the partition holding /etc, and
make sure that root still has write perms to /etc, but other than that
I have no clue.  Please, someone, help me figure out what these folks
have done to their poor box! :)

TIA for any help,
-- 
<---------------------------------------------------------------------->
 Chris H. Bidler                                   cbidler@talkware.net 
 Associate Engineer, Applications Group               
 Universal Talkware Corp.

 "In any event, is a O^(log N) search that returns the wrong answer
  really better than an O^N search that returns the right answer?"
<---------------------------------------------------------------------->