freebsd stable - Jun 2010 - extremely strange results with "mail" or "make" after one day uptime

Hello all,

I have absolutley no idea how it comes:
After one or two days of uptime, 'make -j3 buildworld' just returns 
without any error but without doing anything.
Also sending mail via 'mail' produces mutilatet output: no valid rcpt, 
no subject.
When I reboot the machine everything is fine again.
Daily status reports also stop working; that's how I found this 
absolutley mysterious spookie thing.
And: sshguard destroys hosts.allow. It's suddenly empty.
The jails don't seem to suffer form that ghost.
My setup:
8.1-prerelease on amd64 with _read-only_ / (and unionfs /etc), and 
dozends of ZFS filesystems for jails.

Where to start to debug?

Any hints highly appreciated.

-Harry

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Harald Schmalzbauer schrieb am 10.06.2010 10:10
(localtime):
> Hello all,
> 
> I have absolutley no idea how it comes:
> After one or two days of uptime, 'make -j3 buildworld' just returns
> without any error but without doing anything.
> Also sending mail via 'mail' produces mutilatet output: no valid
rcpt,
> no subject.
> When I reboot the machine everything is fine again.
> Daily status reports also stop working; that's how I found this 
> absolutley mysterious spookie thing.
> And: sshguard destroys hosts.allow. It's suddenly empty.
It seems that any text handling routine gets crazy because 
/var/run/jail_XXX.id is also empty when starting new jails.
It worked at machine boot, since older running jails do have a number in 
their id file. Only newer started/restarted jails have an empty id file.
Also the hosts.allow gets reproducable emptied by sshguard.

Where's the part of FreeBSD doing such text manipulation?
Maybe that's also responsable for makefile parsing and such explains the 
'make' failure? Interesting is that 'make' without -j3 at least
starts
the build, but reproducable fails at different points while src tree is 
absolutely consistent. If I mount it elsewhere everything compiles fine.

And to ephisize: This mysteric behaviour of some base system components 
appears only after some uptime. I haven't seen it the first day after 
fresh booting.

Anybody any ideas? I'm desperate because I don't know here I could start
to search/test.

Thanks in advance,

-Harry

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