andy@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Andy Clews) (08/22/89)
A couple of weeks ago I posted a slightly scathing, but good humoured, article about the problems being caused by our buggy X.25 daemon on our S81, which caused fairly regular unkillable zombies (they would only die when the X.25 daemon was restarted). Gosh! The response was most impressive. Someone somewhere must have kicked ass because within DAYS we had a new, bugfixed X.25 daemon, and I am pleased to report that, so far, it is performing beautifully, with no more zombie logins appearing. Thank you Sequent, for getting it together. Thanks in particular to Dean Phetteplace (hope spelling's correct) for starting the ball rolling with the followup phone call from Portland. Oh, and thank Me for posting the article :-) Cheers! -- Andy Clews, Computing Service, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QN, ENGLAND JANET: andy@syma.sussex.ac.uk BITNET: andy%syma.sussex.ac.uk@uk.ac Voice: +44 273 606755 ext.2129
jim@cs.strath.ac.uk (Jim Reid) (08/23/89)
In article <1263@syma.sussex.ac.uk> andy@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Andy Clews) writes: >Thank you Sequent, for getting it together. Thanks in particular to Dean >Phetteplace (hope spelling's correct) for starting the ball rolling with >the followup phone call from Portland. In light of our experiences with UK support, perhaps comp.sys.sequent is the forum for raising problems? I've not had the time or the energy to do something about the situation, but the poor responsiveness of UK support is a major irritation. Incidentally, when will Portland get a mailer that can cope with UK addresses? It is particularly frustrating that we've never had ANY response to the mailbugs we've sent. I've had to phone UK support to get the pts reference numbers. [Yes, they didn't even phone me.] Jim
andy@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Andy Clews) (08/29/89)
In article <1263@syma.sussex.ac.uk>, andy@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Andy Clews) writes: > A couple of weeks ago I posted a slightly scathing, but good humoured, > article about the problems being caused by our buggy X.25 daemon on our > S81 [...] > [...] within DAYS we had a new, bugfixed X.25 daemon, and I > am pleased to report that, so far, it is performing beautifully, with no > more zombie logins appearing. Martin Jones of Sequent Europe pointed out an inaccuracy in my posting, and I am therefore pleased to set the record straight. I quote from his message (I asked his permission but haven't heard anything for a few days, so I hope he doesn't mind being quoted): "Thank you for posting your follow up article. I would however like to point out one inaccuracy. The zombie process problem was nothing to do with the X.25 daemon. The problem was in the X.29 handler, which is partly on the controller board, and partly in the kernel. The fix was a new release of Sequent's X.25 driver and a new front-end module for the controller board. In fact you are still running the exact same daemon as before. The reason I'm pointing this out is not just to be pedantic, but that the Coloured book X.25 daemon is supported by Lancaster University, and they were concerned that the article you posted might lead people to think that they were slow in fixing Coloured Book bugs. In fact quite the opposite is true." ---- I hope this clears things up. My apologies for any embarrassment caused to Lancaster University. And thanks again to all concerned for fixing the bug. -- Andy Clews, Computing Service, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QN, ENGLAND JANET: andy@syma.sussex.ac.uk BITNET: andy%syma.sussex.ac.uk@uk.ac Voice: +44 273 606755 ext.2129