Hello new fedora user here, long time Linux(debian/ubuntu & centos) user though. I experienced a problem with one of our server with Fedora 9(I know its old but the developer insisted this version).

3 days ago the dev team was suddenly disconnected when they were uploading files. I was called to assess the problem. ssh was returning "connection refused" even thoug there was no firewall on that server according to the devs. When I was not able to login too I rebooted the server in hope that I only forgotten my own password. On reboot I dropped to single user mode and noticed that the "/" partition was full so I cleared unwanted files and another thing is I noticed that both the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow file was blank. Good thing there was a copy on /etc called "passwd--" and "shadow--", I cp'ed those files and rebooted and Voila everything was fixed.

Now my question is what was the cause why those files had gone blank? I never experience this kind of problem before in ubuntu and centos so I was thinking it was a distro-specific problem. I already search google but the same question had gone unanswered by the community.

regards
--
Rod James U. Bio
--------------------------------------------
as aj would say, waiting always works either what you want happens, or you die and cannot be perturbed anymore the trouble with this philosophy is that aj sincerely believes it