[19654] in Hotline Meeting
Broken DECStation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lynn B. Reid)
Mon Nov 15 18:52:15 1993
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
Cc: dennism@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 93 18:51:53 EST
From: Lynn B. Reid <lbreid@MIT.EDU>
Hi there:
There is a broken DECStation in our lab. It hung, so we rebooted it
manually (the little button in the back). It reboots up to a normal
athena login prompt, but it won't let anyone log in. There is an
error message at login: "Workstation failed to activate successfully"
and there is an error message in the console that says something like
"No Hesiod information available for samsara" and then an error that
was full of jargon and disappeared before I could write it down.
Anyway, here's the vital statistics:
Name: samsara.mit.edu
Type: DECStation 3100
Private Athena Workstation
Location: 48-209 MIT
Contact: Professor Dennis McLaughlin
Phone: 253-7176
E-mail: lbreid@mit.edu (since dennism can't log in!)
We SUSPECT that the problem has something to do with something dumb that
a user did on the machine. We think he typed:
"detach -a", which lo and behold, detached EVERYTHING. I think this
is a bug, that an average user (NOT the superuser) can do such a
destructive thing by accident.
Could you fix our machine please?
--------
Lynn B. Reid, "brave Boadicea of Bayesian Bullshit"
Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory for Water Resources and Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139
FAX (617) 253-7462 PHONE: (617) 253-5484
Inter/Bitnet: lbreid@mit.edu UUCP: mit-eddie!mit-athena!lbreid
