hartzell@boulder.colorado.edu (George Hartzell) (10/03/90)
****************Background I have been having problems with the Integrated Solutions serial boards that MIPS uses(used) in the M-2000. Under RISC/os 4.0x we saw: "cptimer: dropped tx_intr on unit cpx line x" poping up every once and a while. We were never able to correlate it with anything. When we upgraded to RISC/os 4.5****beta**** we started seeing panics: "PANIC: assertion failed: (((int)cs + POFFMASK) + len - 1) < NBPP, file cp.c, line 535" ***Since this was beta software we considered this part of the deal. When we upgraded to RISC/o 4.50FCS the panic message became: "PANIC: assertion failed: (((int)cs + POFFMASK) + len - 1) < NBPP, file cp.c, line 533" MIPS looked at it a while, and informed us that it was a problem with the driver for the serial boards. At about that time we started noticing that the crashes correlated with sending long postscript jobs to our printers (NEC LC-890, Apple IINT). MIPS gave us a patched driver; now the machine is able to recover from whatever was panicing it before, but has the unfortunate side effect of dumping part of the stream going to the printer. At best this results in blown print jobs, at worst it hangs the printer and someone with root needs to use lpc to abort and start it. We run 2, 3, and 7, and our cable is too long on one of the printers (but we get errors from a very close printer too...). We originally had both printers on one (of our three) serial boards, the problems have continued when we moved each printer to its own serial board (and didn't use the first one in case it had a problem). On a related note, we have never had very good luck with our dial-in modems and our inbound connections with an asynch. network (ISN) that also depends on modem control. Originally I (and MIPS) blamed the modem flakyness on our "signalman" hayes clones, and we blamed the ISN flakiness on the ISN. I recently bought US Robotics 2400 baud modems, and cabled them to MIPS' specs and still have them hang every other day or so. They will answer the phone, but the M-2000 getty never seems to notice. We get similar behavior on the ISN, with more flames since it is the primary access method for our biochemistry subculture. ************** The question (finally) I would like to hear about people's experiences (good and bad) with serial I/O on their MIPS systems (in general and on the M-2000 in particular). Has anyone else seen this panic or had problems with long jobs to postscript printers? Am I the only person with this problem (maybe it's me???), or are others affected Does anyone reliably use US Robotics 2400 baud modems on their MIPS? How did you do it? I'd love to hear about your cables, switch settings, getty setup, etc... Can anyone confirm/deny that MIPS does/does not run RISC/os on the internal machine that they use as a modem server? g. George Hartzell (303) 492-4535 MCD Biology, University of Colorado-Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309 hartzell@Boulder.Colorado.EDU ..!ncar!boulder!hartzell
lgy@phys.washington.edu (Laurence G. Yaffe) (10/03/90)
hartzell@boulder.colorado.edu (George Hartzell) writes: >I would like to hear about people's experiences (good and bad) with >serial I/O on their MIPS systems (in general and on the M-2000 in >particular). Has anyone else seen this panic or had problems with >long jobs to postscript printers? Am I the only person with this >problem (maybe it's me???), or are others affected I've had problems with serial I/O (particularly bidirectional use) on a 2030, but little trouble with our M/2000. However, we don't have modems or printers directly tied the M/2000's serial ports. (All our modems sit on Micom switch, and our printer is on a parallel port.) >Can anyone confirm/deny that MIPS does/does not run RISC/os on the >internal machine that they use as a modem server? I'd love to know. >George Hartzell (303) 492-4535 > MCD Biology, University of Colorado-Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309 >hartzell@Boulder.Colorado.EDU ..!ncar!boulder!hartzell -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurence G. Yaffe Internet: lgy@newton.phys.washington.edu University of Washington Bitnet: yaffe@uwaphast.bitnet
rogerk@mips.COM (Roger B.A. Klorese) (10/03/90)
In article <lgy.654901220@newton> lgy@phys.washington.edu (Laurence G. Yaffe) writes: >hartzell@boulder.colorado.edu (George Hartzell) writes: >>Can anyone confirm/deny that MIPS does/does not run RISC/os on the >>internal machine that they use as a modem server? > I'd love to know. We run RISC/os on some of the systems which support our modems, and UMIPS-BSD on two others. -- ROGER B.A. KLORESE MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. MS 6-05 930 DeGuigne Dr. Sunnyvale, CA 94086 +1 408 524-7421 rogerk@mips.COM {ames,decwrl,pyramid}!mips!rogerk "I'm the NLA" "Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself." --Rita Mae Brown