[2594] in SIPB bug reports
Re: The hundred thousand dollar question: What made latex die suddenly?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (mhpower@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Sun Mar 15 17:26:02 1992
From: mhpower@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: jh@galileo.ifa.hawaii.edu
Cc: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: [2593] in SIPB bug reports
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 92 17:25:09 EST
>As of sometime Friday evening or Saturday morning, latex (both sipb
>biglatex and athena latex) stopped working on our machine
...
>LaTeX Version 2.09 <4 Aug 1988>
>Prepared for MIT Project Athena. (/usr/athena/lib/tex/macros/article.sty)
>! Undefined control sequence.
I was able to repeat this problem, although I don't understand it
completely.
I tried running latex on test.tex several times, using different
DECstation configurations. What I found was:
1) Running latex from a machine that accessed latex directly via its
local AFS software worked consistently.
2) Running latex from a machine that accessed latex via an NFS mount
of atalanta:/afs worked successfully about 10% of the time,
otherwise it failed with one of a variety of "Undefined control
sequence" errors, such as the one quoted above.
3) The behavior in (2) was also found when using an NFS mount of
charon:/afs.
4) Whenever latex failed, ULTRIX logged two errors, which showed up
in uerf like:
EVENT CLASS OPERATIONAL EVENT
OS EVENT TYPE 250. ASCII MSG
...
MESSAGE NFS read failed for server atalanta:
_Timed out
(or "server charon", obviously).
My guess is that the problem isn't on astron, and isn't on the afs-nfs
translator (I believe you're using atalanta). Perhaps there's some
type of afs problem (?) or some type of network problem. All of the
fileservers for decmips versions of latex (athena or sipb) are in W20,
so problems in network traffic to the 18.70 subnet might be relevant.
Matt
