m.wales@Ucla-Security@sri-unix (12/11/82)
From: m.wales at Ucla-Security (Rich Wales) Date: 8 December 1982 1145-PST (Wednesday) We are running 4.1BSD on several VAX 750's. On most of them (maybe all, but I'm not sure), if you reboot by hitting the white RESET button, the time-of-day register sometimes loses several minutes (usually about five minutes). The same thing happens if you power off and then power on. The problem doesn't seem to be dependent on UNIX. I walked up to a 750 just now that had been running DEC diagnostics, and I was able to produce the problem in console mode. (The command "E/I 1B" below dis- plays the TODR register -- the clock.) >>>E/I 1B I 0000001B 8A501304 >>> [I hit the RESET button here.] %% 00000000 16 >>>E/I 1B I 0000001B 8A4F248C <-- NOTE: jumped back! >>> The funny thing is that, when I subsequently tried the same thing on the same machine, the problem would not recur. Perhaps it is something which will only happen once every several hours on a given CPU. Since the problem is not reliably reproducible, I don't know whether it affects all our 750's or just some of them, and so far we have not been able to get a satisfactory solution from DEC. Has anyone out there encountered this problem? Has anyone been able to get DEC to fix it? -- Rich Wales (Wales at UCLA-Security)