[27563] in Hotline Meeting
New sgi failure mode??
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Sat Mar 25 14:22:18 1995
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 95 14:22:12 -0500
To: skunks@MIT.EDU
Cc: hotline@MIT.EDU, dkk@MIT.EDU
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
(If this kind of thing shouldn't go to skunks, please let me know).
This morning I noticed a new kind of problem with the SGIs.
A user came into the SIPB office and asked why it was that
first time he had logged into an sgi (a few days ago), he
got the SGI environment (which he was happy with, yay...) but
TODAY he found it tried to load his customizations (as if he
had set skip_sgi in his .environment).
I went and looked at it, and we determined that the problem was
local to one specific workstation (w20-575-106). For some reason,
it didn't want to load the SGI environment.
I looked at it, examined /etc/athena/login/* and /usr/athena/lib/update/*,
and everything seemed normal. In retropect, invoking track -n might've
been useful, but at this point it seemed that:
Someone had modified stuff in an intricate manner for some
bizarre reasons, or things had otherwise severely broken.
or
Some daemon, program, or whatever had crashed, causing problems.
The latter seeming more likely, I rebooted the machine. It came up
multiuser, but upon a login attempt, the console window would indicate
it couldn't find /usr/athena/lib/init/xsession and dump you back at
the xlogin prompt.
Booting the machine single user [incidently, chatting with dkk this
morning suggests that perhaps not everyone is familiar w/ the
easiest way to do so:
Power-up the machine
When asked if you want to configure the machine,
hit ESC (or click the button w/ the mouse; I find it annoying
to have to click before it times out...).
Press 5 (or click the 5th option if you like the mouse).
Type ``single''. It's not necessary to boot sash manually
and give it all sorts of flags...
], I found that /usr/athena wasn't there (explaining why it can't find
/usr/athena/lib/init/xsession). This was pretty strange since it was
there before I rebooted...
Anyway, I figured out how to start AFS without xlogin (well, sort-of:
just run /etc/rc2 and suspend it (^Z) after it displays the output
from config_afs), and then I ran /srvd/install/track_line.client
(well, I used track -v instead of track -q), and it added the
/usr/athena -> /srvd/usr/athena symlink, and everything seemed
hunky-dory.
For good measure (or to insure sanity :-)), I rebooted the machine
and it seemed fine.
--jhawk (who thinks, at this point, that the most fundamental problem
with Athena's SGI port is NOT the idea of using the existing
user interface, nor is it the laid-back attitude of not
porting everything, but is the assumption that Athena can be
expected to deal with the SGIs without additional staff or
resources, in addition to the already-too-large workload)
