/bin got trashed, "Cannot execute binary file."

[Cris Fuhrman, Systems Manager]

Salut,

I recently had a problem with a Sun 3/60 disk-server to four 3/50's - the
/bin directory got trashed - for the second time (it happened last
semester too).  The 5 machines were all dead, and the /bin directory on
the server was blitzed so bad that fsck demanded I run it manually from
single user '#'.  Anyway, I got numerous files (all in /bin) which read as
having unknown file types.  fsck just deleted them, and things looked ok
from there.

I copied mini-unix to the swap partition, and reinstalled /bin (I had a
tar tape from when this happened last time).  Everything works ok -except:
When a user logs in to the SERVER machine, he gets the following message:

    Last login: Mon Feb 27 17:41:25 from annex01
    Sun UNIX 4.2 Release 3.5 (SUNF) #7: Fri Oct 7 16:23:22 EDT 1988
->  Cannot exec binary file.

This seems to occur independent of the user or his .cshrc/.login file (as
I have mv'd all the .(files) in my account and I still get this message.
The man pages on login don't mention any files that get executed at login
(except /bin/login and perhaps /bin/csh or /bin/sh).  Can anyone tell me
where this error is coming from?

[[ My guess is "/usr/ucb/quota".  I recall that login runs that at some
point to produce notices about a user exceeding his/her quota.  --wnl ]]

Also, has anyone ever heard of a bug that causes /bin to get trashed on
the server?  As this is the second time it has happened in less than 6
months, I'm wondering if someone else has had this experience.

-Cris