[15747] in Athena Bugs
vold lossage...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (john hawkinson in a lower-case moo)
Tue Jan 13 01:20:01 1998
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 01:19:58 -0500
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
From: john hawkinson in a lower-case mood <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
vold continues to die periodically on cluster machines,
engendering much user complaints due to the critical
nature of supporting the playing of audio cd roms
in cluster machines, which seems to be a double-digit
percentage of the questions that come to the sipb office.
having some way to debug this would be nice.
it doesn't tend to stick to any particular machine.
it tends to happen randomly.
i've only seen it in the cluster, never elsewhere.
i don't know what the impetus is, usually people come
to a machine and find vold not running/functioning.
personally i suspect that vold is segfaulting but
it can't coredump because it's CWD is in afs space
(cf. prior bug report from some time ago).
but maybe someone is going around killing vold.
so perhaps someone could think about solving this problem
to stem the ever-continuing flow of "The CD player doesn't
work" questions that are so clearly critical issues for
the students of these late Nineties. perhaps
adding a symlink to vold's CWD pointing at /var/tmp/core.vold
restarting vold, or checking for it from reactivate
having a wrapper script around it that restarts it and logs
whenever such is necessray
something else
ignoring the problem and continuing the inundation
seems suboptimal, at least from my perspective.
--jhawk
ps: perhaps this is a sign that SIPB needs to run xstapler again.
