[comp.sys.sun] Running dclock on OpenWindows causing SunOS crash

epstein@uunet.uu.net (Jeremy Epstein) (06/05/91)

Environment: Sun 4/260 running SunOS 4.1.1 and OpenWindows 2.0

We have a *very* strange problem...one of our users runs "dclock"
(I believe patchlevel 4, but I'm not positive), and that user's
server crashes every day precisely at 1:00pm.  If the user kills
dclock before that time, then the system doesn't crash.  I've
checked, and there's no cron jobs or anything else running.

If I look at the logs in /usr/adm/messages*, some of the days
don't have any crash indications.  Those which do all look the same:
	BAD TRAP
	pid xxxx, `xnews': Data fault
	kernel read fault at addr=0x0, pme=0x70000000
	Bus Error Reg 80<INVALID>
and so on with registers, tracebacks, etc.  We haven't tried this
on any machines other than one 4/260 (we're planning to), so I
suppose it's possible that it could be hardware related.

I haven't yet tried to figure out exactly where it's crashing,
but something is really wrong if xnews (the OpenWindows server)
is causing the system to crash.

Has anyone else seen this problem (or perhaps other programs which
cause OpenWindows to crash SunOS)?  Can anyone reproduce the problem
(if anyone is willing to try :-) ).  Is there any known solution?

We could stop running dclock (that's no big deal), but we're
concerned that there's a lurking bug which could manifest itself
in other ways once the system is out in the field.

Thanks for any help...in the meantime we'll be working on analyzing
the traceback.

--Jeremy
-- 
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