[45766] in Hotline Meeting
BioSym problems in 4-035
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Mon Nov 9 13:46:30 1998
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
Cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, facdev@MIT.EDU, network@MIT.EDU, ops@MIT.EDU,
mbarker@MIT.EDU, rbasch@MIT.EDU, nschmidt@MIT.EDU, fuzzballs@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 1998 13:46:21 EST
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
A user reported problems running BioSym on O2s in 4-035 and I can
confirm that there are serious problems on at least some of the
machines. There is urgency in getting this fixed because this is one
of our heavily used electronic classrooms.
Symptoms: after the launch command is given, the machine seems to
take a very long time starting up the application- from 5-10 min.,
after which it either: stays "hung" in wait state, segfaults or core
dumps. A given machine may "hang" on one launch attempt, and core dump
on another, or in some cases, actually start BioSym some of the time.
(In N42, it starts in under a minute and I see no sign of any problem).
The user reporting the problem said that even when it was working it took
over 5 min. to start even when the room was only sparsely populated. This
seems like a pretty big difference to me- is 4-035 in some king of
network bottleneck? Any chance it could be alleviated?
I also noted, on most of the machines I tried, numerous console error
messages about "lost contact with file server xxxx" and "contact with
file server xxxx restored", where xxxx included 18.145.0.29 and 18.159.0.49.
Machines where I saw the problem: m4-035-3, m4-035-5, m4-035-16. It ran
correctly most of the time on m4-035-12, but crashed there on at least one
launch attempt.
How to test: do "add biosym_root" followed by
"source /mit/biosym_root/cshrc970" followed by "insightII" from a directory
where you have write permission. On an O2, the GUI should open within a
minute. To test our second BioSym release after you have done the above,
do "set_biosym_context 400", followed by "insightII"- a similar but different
GUI should open.
I don't know at this point if a complete machine reinstall is necessary or
appropriate- we need more data and I'm not sure what is going on. The room
was very crowded and I didn't have time to try other applications but people
seemed to be running the usual things (including Netscape) without
problems. I haven't heard any other problem reports so I'm not sure if the
problems are localized to 4-035.
Alex
PS- the CRTs on the machines nearest the back wall (away from the
door) have very bad screen jitter from some kind of interference. It's
so bad that they're virtually unusable.
