[411] in Athena Bugs
OLC and bldg 9
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas J. Coppeto)
Fri May 27 17:14:06 1988
To: hotline@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, consultants@ATHENA.MIT.EDU,
Cc: beth@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, olc-bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, geer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU,
Date: Fri, 27 May 88 17:12:53 EDT
From: Thomas J. Coppeto <tjcoppet@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Hello.
There is something wrong with communication from the e40 and other
public Athena clusters to some of the bldg. 9 cluster of IBM RT's,
namely penn.mit.edu and bullfinch.mit.edu. 'Finger' and 'write' seem
to hang when trying to contact these machines. Other bldg. 9 machines
seem to be ok but no one was on them. Problems seem to arise when someone
is logged in. I spoke to Joe Ferreira (ferreira, x3-7410) and he said
that this must have been something new since it has worked in the past.
The major problem for us is that OLC depends on a successful write
to the user. Due to some problems in the code, when the write fails
due to a time out, the consultant is not fully inserted into the
'consultant ring'. This is a just a theory but the real result is that
the OLC daemon seemingly hangs and soon crashes and all current OLC
conversations are lost.
The OLC server is admidst a revision but it be a while (until the next
Athena release) until the problem is solved in the field. I would
really like to know what causes these problems in communication, if it
is known. These problems may have accounted for a fair perecntage
of OLC problems in the past if other machines have experienced similar
problems.
In the meantime I request that users of the building 9 workstations
not use OLC until the problem is solved. If a user from that area
asks an OLC question, (OLC consultants:) do not grab it without trying
to write or finger the user outside of OLC. The danger is that we may
disrupt service for other Athena users in need.
I hope this problem is a transient thing and I sincerely apologize
to users of these workstations. I hope to hear from Athena operations
as to the cause and possible short term solution to the problem.
Tom Coppeto
OLC maintainer
