ugogan@ecsvax.UUCP (Jim Gogan) (02/07/88)
Urgent request for help, pointers, suggestions, prayers, chants,
appropriate incantations, etc.:
We (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) maintain a number of
networked public microcomputer labs on campus. Two of them (with 31 and
15 IBM PCs) have been running for about a year with IBM PC Network hardware
and Novell NetWare as the network operating system (286 v2.0a). For the
past week, we have been seeing random occurrances of floppy disk
directories being overwritten with the directory of the previous user at
that workstation. (Receipe for instant chaos = one disk directory + 360
kilobytes of unrelated student data and term papers!)
At least eight disks (possibly more) in the past week have been trashed
in this manner. Unfortunately, eight out of hundreds of users per day
have not been a sufficient number to track down exactly what is occuring.
We do know that at least 4 of these incidents have occurred on one
particular machine; it is always possible that people may not have
noticed the damage until they went to use their disk again on another
computer.
We finally were able to get someone "at the scene of the crime" yesterday
(the head of our Micro User Service). He noticed that not only did the
directory listing being displayed for that diskette (on "one particular
machine" described above) not match what was known to be on the diskette,
but the drive light was not coming on for the directory search - i.e.,
the floppy drive was not being accessed!!!! (You could even leave the
drive empty with the door open and it would still display that same
directory.) Eventually, the drive light came on, the drive was
accessed, and the directory was overwritten. We have not since been able
to replicate this occurrence.
As of this point, our leading possibilities are:
1) we have some "power user" who doesn't really know what they're doing
who gotten hold of a program that caches floppy disk sectors (including
the directory). (For those of you who doubt that this can happen, try
taking a copy of ProComm 2.4, changing some of the setup characteristics
to disk, replacing your ProComm disk with another diskette, then exiting
ProComm - look at the directory of that second disk!);
2) a hardware malfunction on the floppy controller or drive logic board
(or even PC Network card) on that "one particular machine" that's flakey
enough not to catch;
3) a problem with one of the software packages on the network
(overwhelming majority of uses of the network are Microsoft Word and Word
Perfect - network versions of both) and/or Novell NetWare;
4) termite hackers.
[I'm inclined not to think that #3 above is likely, else we would have
seen this problem much sooner than now.]
If anyone has seen this problem before - either on a network or stand
alone PCs - particularly the instance of the empty disk drive still being
able to display a directory listing - PLEASE reply by e-mail as soon as
possible. (I'm a little over 2,400 net news articles behind in my
reading - I'd appreciate not having a reply posted that way!). I will
summarize our eventual (hoping to be soon) findings.
-- Jim Gogan (ugogan@ecsvax)
Microcomputing Support Center
UNC - CH
(919) 962-0101
--
Jim Gogan mail:ugogan@ecsvax (UUCP/BITNET)
Microcomputing Support Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27514