$ vim
Segmentation fault

Help! I can't run vim on my linode. It always gets "Segmentation fault" msg.
I have two ssh connections to this linode. One is connected two hours ago, and one is connected a few minutes ago. The second one can't run vim, but I still keep the first one connection which can still run vim normally.

Should I reboot? or check something else?
Is it possible relate to "denyhosts"? This hour "denyhosts" keep reporting my IP into /etc/hosts.deny, so I tried to remove my IP in hosts.deny and modified /etc/denyhosts.conf, and "service denyhosts restart" it.

Thanks for the help!

Very nasty. My guess is it's some library issue, most likely from a half-done upgrade.

What distro are you running?

You could try reinstalling vim. On a debian distro use:

apt-get --reinstall install vim

Or on a RPM distro use:

yum reinstall vim

If you really need to edit something while vim is not working, you could use nano. It's not as powerful as vim, but good enough for editing a few configuration files. So don't be afraid to reinstall packages and restart your server, you'll still be able to edit stuff while you figure out the problem.

I don't think denyhosts has anything to do with the segfault, but you should definitely fix it so that you don't get locked out of your own server. (But again, you can use Lish if you ever get locked out.)