bovet@hao.ucar.edu (Ray Bovet) (09/07/89)
We have been experiencing crashes at NCAR on Suns that have considerable terminal activity. The two machines which originally experienced the problem are both 4/280s but a Sun 3 now shows similar symptoms. The Sun 4s crash with either Data fault errors or Memory Alignment errors. The Sun 3 crashes with a Bus Error. The one common feature that we have identified is that this only seems to happen to machines which have a considerable terminal load on them. In our case this equates to 20 users or so at 9600 baud. Sun is hard at work on the problem. In the meantime, we are curious whether other sites with substantial terminal loads experience the same crashes. PLEASE send EMAIL if you have a substantial terminal load directly on your machine (rlogins and the like don't seem to count), whether you see these crashes or not! I will be happy to post a summary of the results we get as well as the eventual solution to this problem. A few more details: we see the crashes under SunOS 4.0.1 with YAPT 5.5c installed. We _do_ have the most recent cpu boards installed. The problem occurs both with ALM-1 and ALM-2 boards. Under SunOS 4.0.3 the crashes increased in frequency from ~ 1 crash every 3 days to ~ 3 crashes per day! Ray