[43134] in Hotline Meeting
suns hanging
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeff Gilman Bigler)
Fri May 1 16:26:26 1998
Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 16:24:08 -0400
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
Cc: sipb-office@MIT.EDU
From: Jeff Gilman Bigler <jcb@MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: jcb@MIT.EDU
During the past week, three users have come into the SIPB office from
W20 with their Sun workstations hung. In all three cases, the machines
did not ping, and failed to respond to the Stop-A key sequence (even
after unplugging and re-plugging the keyboard cable).
Two of the machines that exhibited this behavior were w20-575-55 and
w20-575-33. I failed to note the machine name of the other machine. In
all three cases, the machines came up cleanly and appeared to function
normally after booting. I was not able to discover any common program
that the users were running at the time their machines hung. (One
user's machine hung during the login process.)
After some discussion of the symptoms with other SIPB members, it was
decided (for the lack of any other ideas) that it was appropriate in
these instances to turn the machines off, wait about a minute, and turn
them back on. In doing so, I made sure to tell the users that this was
an unusual situation, that power cycling Sun workstations was normally a
bad thing to do because of the risk of permanent damage to the
workstations, and that if there were any resulting negative
repurcussions from I/S, I would assume the responsibility for them.
Is there a more appropriate action that should be taken when this
happens? If so, what is it?
Jeff Bigler
Associate Member, SIPB
