benson@ksr.com (Benson Margulies) (12/21/88)
My 3/60 seems to either drop packets or provoke dropped packets in a singular and annoying fashion. We use RCS. When an NFS acknowledgment packet disappears, NFS gets a spurious error code, and fails an operation. Similiarly, a simple mv command will fail to receive the response to the rename, even though it has succeeded, throwing an elaborate make into disarray. This evening, it is happening quite nearly reliably, even though there is next to no load on the net, and the server whose responses are disappearing is a 4/280. The symptoms vary -- sometimes I get Server foo not responding, and sometimes I get idempotency bugs. The 3/ servers have the same problem sat other times. The hotline has been unhelpful. My local FE, doing his level best as always, gave me a brand-spanking-new CPU board, but to no apparent avail. Another site responded to an earlier message with a story about bad ether timing crystals, but their FE left Sun, and now no one admits to knowing anything about the story. There's not much left in a 3/60 after one changes the CPU, so that leaves SunOS 3.5, the tranceiver, or gremlins. Not one other 3/60 in the facility, some used in very similiar ways, demonstrates this behavior. Any advice short of sui- or worstation- icide gratefully accepted. Benson I. Margulies Kendall Square Research Corp. harvard!ksr!benson benson@ksr.com