[33149] in Hotline Meeting
possible problem with w20-575-12
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Mumpower)
Tue Apr 23 23:45:20 1996
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 23:45:13 -0400
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
From: Eric Mumpower <nocturne@MIT.EDU>
this afternoon around 4pm, a user came into the sipb office to report that
the workstation they had been using (w20-575-12) had frozen. Inspection
showed that the workstation had dropped to the boot monitor as a result of a
watchdog reset. I tried to convince the machine to resume operation, by
typing "go" at the boot prompt, to no avail. I suspect I didn't quite know
what I was doing at that point. I rebooted the machine singleuser to move
the user's autosave files from /var/tmp to a temporary resting place in the
root directory.
I exited the singleuser shell and entered runlevel 6 (to reboot); the
machine soft-reset as expected, but, while booting up, at some point during
or shortly after fsck'ing, it suffered another watchdog reset; at the
resulting boot prompt I typed "boot". The machine came up cleanly after this
point, with no watchdog problems.
I'd suspect the watchdog triggerings represent some hardware problem, but
that's a wholly uneducated guess. I leave it to you folks to analyze the
symptoms I report. :-)
Eric
