Strange Raspberry Pi behavior (Raspbian Wheezy)

[^rooker]

[PROBLEM]
For some (yet unknown) reason, my Raspberry Pi fileserver is running super-slow at the moment.
I know I'm giving it a hard time, running a kernel software RAID and GlusterFS on top, but recently transfer speeds dropped even more, although I didn't change anything.

Now I tried to update Samba, and ran into the following error:

Preconfiguring packages ...
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
files list file for package 'libcupsfilters1:armhf' is missing final newline
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

It turned out that the mentioned "/var/lib/dpkg/info/libcupsfilters1:armhf" didn't contain a text list, but some binary data. in Vim displayed as lots of "^@". Seems like NULLs (according to hexdump):

Code: Select all

0000000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

Something fishy's going on here...
No good. No good!

To be continued...

Links:

• Thread: files list file for package 'xxx' is missing final newline (ubuntuforums.org)
• apt-get dpkg error: files list file ... missing final newline (linuxquestions.org)