Afternoon Problems

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     At 2:59pm today (October 4, 1998), the FDDI card on Eskimo wedged
effectively isolating it from the network and all the other machines. 

     Because user files, which include web pages, mail related files in users
directories like .forward and .procmailrc, and user authentication is done on
Eskimo, this problem cascaded to several other machines by the time I had
gotten Eskimo booted. 

     I took Eskimo down gracefully but power cycled it to be sure all hardware
was reset and when I did so it didn't want to come back up.  It took several
attempts.

     Both problems, the FDDI card wedging, and it taking several attempts to
power up the machine are long standing problems, the former I believe is
related to SunOS's limitation on mbuf's being too restrictive to really feed a
FDDI at full throttle, and perhaps bugs in the driver, the latter problem seems
to be related to the Ross CPU's and possibly the modified boot ROM that goes
with it. 

     When the machine finally did boot, both www and www2 had gone out to lunch
because of all the processes backing up on them trying to access files on
eskimo, and because Eskimo mounts some partitions from these machines this
delayed being able to fully bring the system up into multi-user mode.  I got
Eskimo back up at about 4:05pm, and it took another twenty minutes or so to get
both www and www2 stable.