[6779] in Athena Bugs
Re: vax 7.1H: system rvd packs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu Jan 3 11:52:33 1991
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 91 11:54:32 -0500
From: tldavis@hstbme.mit.edu (Timothy Davis)
To: jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU, tldavis@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Thank you for responding re:losing disk pack subdirectories on the
terminal server / vax3100 pasteur.mit.edu.
It has been some time now since I have noticed the problem, but I'll try
to answer your questions:
By "/srvd looks ok" I mean that 'ls -l /srvd' looked the same as on
a properly working workstation; however, 'ls -la /srvd/bin', for instance
would show NO files (not even . and ..); the same was true for all
subdirectories of /srvd, but not /srvd itself.
I don't remember whether 'mount' and 'attach' showed /srvd to be
attached and mounted, but I >think< they probably both indicated that
it was. I did some more horsing around than I indicated trying to get
it to work without rebooting, such as 'attach -f' the appropriate
pack name, unmounting and remounting, etc. but to no avail. I'm less
confident that I know exactly how to do those things correctly, and I
didn't want to give incorrect information.
'mkserv' was run on it, with the options (?) which make it allow rlogins,
but I didn't do it myself. If you want to know details, oliver@mit.edu
might remember what he did to it. It is running toehold, or at least
starts up that way, with "hit any key to continue" just like an Athena
workstation.
As you know, it has been some 3 months since my bug report, and I haven't
rebooted the machine under those circumstances since then. However,
the machine does occasionally hang. Once I observed that it wiped out its
keyboard input, so that no key entry did anything at all, even at the
HLT
>>>
monitor prompt. Turning the halted machine off for awhile fixed it.
The machine does sometimes deactivate. I have noticed that in its deactivated
state, one must manually activate it if coming in from rlogin. We who use
it just modified our .logins to check for something on the disk pack and
conditionally run /etc/athena/activate. So activation isn't the problem.
If your next system software update fixes these problems, we can probably
wait until then.
--------
By the way, several of the machines in that cluster seem to spontaneously
reboot frequently. One RT in particular, I believe E25-131-10 ... can't
remember, but it is in the back left corner of the back room, just to the
right of the printer, I've seen reboot itself 3-4 times in one hour. No
flickering lights, no other machines simultaneously rebooting, just that one.
Thanks for your help
Tim Davis
tldavis@hstbme.mit.edu
