nick@aimed.UUCP (Nick Pemberton) (02/16/91)
Greetings.
I have some trouble brewing. This machine, a 386 running SCO
Xenix 2.3.2, has recently run into a deeply wierd problem. The system has
been up and running flawlessly for about 2.5 years now, with the occasional
rebuild of the filesytems to avoid fragmentation. The machine is only used
as our news machine (since nobody likes being on a machine grinding away
on rnews...). No new hardware or software changes have taken place (except
adding a few more uucp connections)
The problem: The system just stops. The Disc light comes on, but there is
no movement on the disk drive. One can hit the ALT-Fn, to switch between
virtual screens, one can type and see the typing echoed, but as soon as
it tries to execute anything (even a login), the process hangs.
This is merely annoying right now, since I have to reboot at the office,
and it typically goes down at about 3:00 am (actually there is no pattern
to when it goes down - I find nothing in crontabs, nothing in the
uucp .Logs, nothing regularly occuring at crash time). Today it hung with
no activity other then two rn sessions (ie no rnews, uucico, etc - so the
process table couldn't have been full)
I'd really like to solve this soon, before anything major happens. I'm
sure my downstream sites are getting a little annoyed at the problem.
I've run a full non-destructive verify of the disk, and fsck more times
then I can remember, plus several cpios to tape just in case.
Any ideas, hints, etc?
Thanks,
Nick
--
Nick Pemberton uucp: !{lsuc, uunet!mnetor}!aimed!nick
AIM, Inc bus: (416) 429-1085
Toronto, Ontario, Canada Home: (416) 690-0647goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) (02/19/91)
In article <8793@aimed.UUCP> nick@aimed.UUCP (Nick Pemberton) writes: >Greetings. > >I have some trouble brewing. This machine, a 386 running SCO >Xenix 2.3.2, has recently run into a deeply wierd problem... > >The problem: The system just stops. The Disc light comes on, but there is >no movement on the disk drive. One can hit the ALT-Fn, to switch between >virtual screens, one can type and see the typing echoed, but as soon as >it tries to execute anything (even a login), the process hangs. In general, it's much easier to diagnose such problems if a full hardware list is included, along with your version of Xenix and any supplements you've added. In this case, the particular controller you're using is going to have some impact on the answer. For instance, if you've got a WD1007A we'll ask whether you've installed sls133. If not, that's probably your fix. -Richard
mike@bria (02/21/91)
In an article, aimed.UUCP!nick (Nick Pemberton) writes: >The problem: The system just stops. The Disc light comes on, but there is >no movement on the disk drive. One can hit the ALT-Fn, to switch between >virtual screens, one can type and see the typing echoed, but as soon as >it tries to execute anything (even a login), the process hangs. It sounds like your disk controller may be going out to lunch on you. A considerably more remote possiblity would be that you are experiencing the effects of ``chip creep'' if your temperature variance is high. Cheers, -- Michael Stefanik, MGI Inc., Los Angeles| Opinions stated are not even my own. Title of the week: Systems Engineer | UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Remember folks: If you can't flame MS-DOS, then what _can_ you flame?