[4802] in Hotline Meeting
Power hit in W20
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (postmaster@MIT.EDU)
Sun Apr 28 18:51:40 1991
From: postmaster@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 91 18:51:22 EDT
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
At least most of the 5th floor of W20 (perhaps the whole building)
suffered a power hit at about 17:35 today (Sunday, 4-28). Most of the
machines in the SIPB office (which is where I was), and one-fourth to
one-third of the machines in the w20 cluster, crashed.
It appeared to be a rather nasty power hit. The power was on for a
while, but too low for many of the machines to run properly. From the
way all the machines in one row went wild while the machines in the
next row were fine, we suspected that one phase of three-phase power
may have gone haywire. The noise and the weirdness of the affected
workstations, made us think something had shorted out.
The problem lasted for only a few seconds, and has not returned. The
only remaining casualties, after about an hour of running fsck
manually, and so on, are the following:
w20-575-36 wf71105448 ["? TPC", Has a hard error on the disk]
w20-575-45 wf71105445 ["?? HDC" and "? TPC"]
w20-575-54 didn't come back at first, but seems to be fine now. It
needed fsck run manually, but even after a power cycle, its keyboard
was confused. By searching around, I managed to find what keys to
press to get the appropriate characters, typed "B/2", etc, and the
keyboard was straightened out after the reboot.
Phys plant came and turned both air conditioners on.
-dkk
