madison@vms.ecs.rpi.edu (Matt Madison) (06/27/89)
Greetings.
I have been charged with assisting some users in another department here
with a small Ultrix problem they're having. As my experience with Ultrix
could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first, this is
nearly the blind leading the blind. Any assistance people would be willing
to lend would be most appreciated.
The setup:
A VAXstation II/GPX, world box, two RD54's, DEQNA, TK50. Nine megabytes
of memory, I think. DUA0 is a VMS system disk. They are trying to use
DUA1 as an Ultrix (actually UWS V2.0/Ultrix V3.0) system disk.
The problem:
The /usr partition (apparently starting with /usr/lib) is getting trashed.
The system boots ok off DUA1 (DUA0 stays off-line), system starts up,
and eventually you get to the DECwindows login window. Looks great.
After some time, though, it becomes apparent that the /usr partition is
getting trashed by something. Nothing unusual appears to be running.
The system is physically isolated from the rest of the network (with
a loopback connector on the DEQNA port).
If one shuts down the system after a couple of hours and starts it
back up again, /dev/rra1g does not pass the normal fsck, and a manual
fsck shows many many bad blocks.
The hardware appears to be ok. The system runs VMS just fine. The
diagnostics were run and everything passed. The disk has been reformatted
and the software reinstalled from scratch, to no avail.
We have a few other workstations of a similar configuration running just fine,
though they run Ultrix only. This has been most perplexing.
Suggestions would be most welcome. Please reply by E-mail. Thanks.
==============================================================================
Matt Madison, Systems Programmer madison@vms.ecs.rpi.edu
Eng. Computing Services, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180-3590
"Please do not press this button again."