david@ukma.UUCP (David Herron, NPR Lover) (05/19/85)
I got a bunch of replies to my question last week. But most were
centered around one question. Had I installed the patches to
/boot which ran the microcode patches.
Yes I had!
But it wasn't what was posted to the net, but something I got
from DEC which they had for Ultrix. (I looked at the code from
the net, and it was essentially the same as DEC's code).
The good replies were from Jim McKie (who suggested a problem with
the memory interconnect module ... something that made the DEC man
nod his head in agreement) and Don Seely at Utah-Cs who suggested
problems with the cache.
However ..... This is one of those stories where the problem just
kind of goes away.
We spent friday (all day) swapping boards in and out of the machine.
We ended up with the EXACT same configuration as had caused us problems
the week before (down to the SAME boards too!).
It's been running for 28 hours now. No crash. No problems.
sigh.
We even went so far as to repeat EXACTLY our actions from before.
We had just run microcode diagnostics (which will wipe any microcode
patches). After booting (almost as soon as we became multi-user) it
crashed with the panics etc that I mentioned last week.
So that's what we did yesterday. (After we had booted it once and it
stayed up for an hour, we looked for ways to repeat exactly what happened.)
I'm curious about one thing. Anybody else running Unix on a 750 with
FPA and KU750 with G&H f.p. loaded? The dec man claims that they're
rare. I'm just curious HOW rare.
And thank you.
--
--- David Herron
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--- or david%ukma.uucp@anl-mcs.arpa
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"It's *Super*User* to the rescue!"henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (05/21/85)
Whenever we've been doing something to our machine's guts and it gives
mysterious problems on boot, the first thing we do is re-seat the boards:
pull them out an inch and then push them back in. If that doesn't fix
it, we re-seat them again. And again. It's remarkably effective. This
might explain some of your problems. Down with edge connectors!
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry