robjohn@OCDIS01.AF.MIL (Contractor Robert Johnson) (06/26/89)
Yesterday, we had a system crash on our 90x. It was as if someone cut
the power out from under it, although the computer room supervisor swears
that there was no problem with the power. It came back up immediately
(autoboot was set on), with very little damage. After inspecting the
logs (and just about everything else I could think of), I still have no
clue why it died. The only unusual thing was a cryptic message which
appeared during the boot - I can't find any documentation on the message.
Can anyone tell me what it means? It said:
errdead: dump time is unreasonable
That was the only thing I could find out of the ordinary. It may not
point to the reason for the crash, but I'd like to know what it means.
Bob Johnson, LOGDIS System Administrator
Tinker Air Force Base, Air Logistics Command
Oklahoma Citykarl@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (06/27/89)
That's errdead(1M-att) babbling at you, trying to find buffered error messages that presumably would not have been flushed by the system immediately preceding a crash. It's invoked without args in /etc/rc, and stares at the last dump in its search. The "unreasonable" diagnostic is errdead telling you that whatever it found in the dump area is not considered a real dump; it found a dump time there which was not within 3 days of "now," so it abandoned the effort. It would appear that your system did indeed fall as hard as possible, without time to execute a dump. No clues... --Karl