[574] in Hotline Meeting
pika machine Gluttony is down
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (cfields@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu May 24 12:09:08 1990
From: cfields@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 24 May 90 12:08:44 -0400
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
Cc: cfields@MIT.EDU
Yesterday, I noticed from my office that gluttony was not responding
to the network. I asked someone logged in at pika to look at it and
tell me what it was doing, and they told me that it seemed to be
rebooting over and over. So I asked them to halt it for me.
When I got to pika later, I looked at it and it was hung; there were
dots seemingly randomly flickering on different parts of the screen,
and some of the text had been "eaten" away. I hit restart and it
couldn't get past 7...6..., so I turned it off for ten minutes.
When I turned it on, it got as far as:
Athena 4.3BSD UNIX...
.
.
.
qe0: deqna at hardware address 08:00:2b:03:c8:b7
qv0 at uba0 csr 177200 vec 360, ipl 17
ra0a: hard error sn2400 ra0a: hard error sn2400 dev = 0x900, ino = 0, fs = /
panic: ifree: freeing free inode
syncing disks...
and then began a cycle of rebooting over and over again, (although I only
let it have a couple of iterations of this) with the same panic.
So I ran rqbads, which "fixed" block 2402, and then rebuilt the disk
from scratch, as the machine could not have booted as far as single
user mode to be able to fix anything. This worked, but only for a
little while. I was able to log in and read some mail, log out, and go
to bed.
However, I tried pinging it again today, and it was again not
responding to the net. I asked someone there to turn on the monitor
and tell me what it was doing. The zephyrgram I got said
There are four - six lines of very wierd text -- the dots don't
properly form letters. I can make out Wed Dec :19 EST on the first
two lines, and memoryu at the end of the next two, and I don't know
what the next two say at all,. And there are various splotches on the
rioght and left sides of the screen further down.
I.e., it's hung with pixels eating away text again. I had her turn it off.
So anyway, it's broken. It's not clear to me what is causing all these
problems.
Craig Fields
pika
