jeff@cjsa.UUCP (C. Jeffery Small) (12/30/87)
Thanks to everyone who sent me reports of their problems with the Unix-pc locking up. This appears to be a widespread problem and is being looked into by AT&T software engineers. The engineers have asked me a question which I have never checked during a lockup and I thought that some of you who are experiencing the problem could check this out the next time the problem occurs. During lockup, keyboard input is typically ignored. The question is: Do the Caps-Lock and Num-Lock lights work (ie come on and off) when the machine has crashed? Mail me the results if you [unfortunately] get the opportunity to verify this. I'll keep these newsgroups posted of any future results. -- Jeffery Small (203) 776-2000 UUCP: uunet!---\ C. Jeffery Small and Associates ihnp4!--- hsi!cjsa!jeff 123 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511 hao!noao!---/
allbery@axcess.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) (01/04/88)
Just in case anyone's interested: I've managed to duplicate that lockup. Notable is that it happened not long after I started rearranging things around the computer... most notably, that d*mned printer cable. I still suspect spurious interrupts; but the printer may not be the only device capable of sending them. (Serial ports? Maybe even bad termination on the expansion ports?) I was able to get the window manager to change the current window, but text output didn't work, and the machine never got to a point in any window where it was ready for input. No, I didn't think to check the Caps Lock or Num Lock. Possibly related? I've been having a few other oddities: Using "windy" too many times, or loading/unloading fonts (even the ones that come with the machine) will cause an "su" in a subwindow to echo the password, and immediately hang. It *can* be interrupted without any problems. I've noticed that this tends to make the pre-crash sequence happen much sooner... and this time, the actual crash as well. (It appears to be based on the "parent" window; log out and log back in (which closes and re-opens your login window) and "windy" again works fine... for a while.) I saw another unusual thing as well: a program which up until just before the crash worked perfectly suddenly started spitting out "calloc returned NULL in _makenew" (yes, it uses curses/terminfo) errors when run. The pre-crash sequence began immediately afterward, when I fired up Emacs to look at the program source.... Conclusion: I strongly suspect a problem where the windaemon is somehow interacting with the page daemon. Spurious interrupts could be causing the latter to go into some strange state, font mounting and/or whatever "windy" does to create new windows could be confusing the former, and the two apparently decide to get into a fight with each other. (Maybe windaemon is causing a massive number of page faults?) The page daemon's involvement would also explain the "out of memory" aspect. -- ___ ________________, Brandon S. Allbery cbosgd \ ' \/ __ __, __, aXcess Company mandrill| __ | /__> <__ <__ 6615 Center St. #A1-105 !ncoast! / ` | \__. .__> .__> Mentor, OH 44060-4101 necntc | axcess!allbery \___/\________________. Moderator, comp.sources.misc hoptoad/
lenny@icus.UUCP (Lenny Tropiano) (01/11/88)
Here is what happened this evening. My machine was unattented all day
as I was out of town. I came home at 2:00am and pressed a key to wake up
the screen saver. Lo and behold I noticed it was talking to one of
my UUCP connections indicated by the status line (phone daemon I wrote).
Now I know not everyone is running this, and this problem existed *LONG*
before I even started work with phdaemon. The clock indicated it was
just 9:56pm (even though it was 2:00am). The keyboard did not respond
in echoing characters and the CAPS/NUM LOCK keys did work (they lit up).
Oh well, had to search for that RESET button at 2am, that was a chore! :-)
The people who are on the war-path at AT&T looking for this problem should
definately go on the idea of the phone manager/window manager problem after
uucico dies. NOTE: I am running HDB UUCP, so it isn't just inherent in
the generic UUCP.
-Lenny
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