dale@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu (Dale Chayes) (09/12/87)
Greetings: I got drafted at lunch the other day to have a look at one of our Masscomps which I am not very familiar with. They suffered some hardware damage in a serious power failure last week (the other five Masscomps here rebooted normaly.) After Masscomp service got them back up, they had to restore their disk from a dump tape (or at least thought they had to.) Any way, they did it. After the restoreation, they could stay up indefinetly in single user, but the system crashed in minutes to an hour after going to multi-user. I assumed that it was a file system problem and agreed to have a look. After turning the system on and booting to single user, I got a couple of xmd ecc errors which went away after a while (perhaps thermal problems). Fsck found three errors, two inodes and free list. I fixed the free list, but the two inode errors continued to occur, no matter how many times I ran fsck. I traced one inode to /dev/tty7 (which I declined to remove and remake since I did not know what was connected to it [and neither did their stand in system manager!!!!]) and the other was not associated with any file. HOW CAN BE THIS WAY? ----------------------------------- We recently ported a set of in-house data reduction software from our Suns to our Masscomps and in the process, have found an interesting differences. First of all, Masscomp does not (yet) include the hashing routines (hscreate() hsearch(), and hsdestroy() in libc.o where they are supposed to be in System V Release 2. I was told that I could get a variant if it was realy important, or that I could take care of it myself. Since we have source and licenses, we found it much easier to take care of ourselves.... ------------------------------------ On another front: Masscomp shipped the Ethernet route deamon (routed) with SP-70_2.0 and 2.0A, although it was not documented, nor 'supported', it worked fine. It is not included with release 2.1, apparently because it will not work with the Lance chipset. It does appeare to work with the EXOS-201 board from Excelan. In a dynamic network, the route deamon makes life a bit easier for those of us who catch the flack when 'it worked yesterday.' --------------------------------------