SUMMARY: Mysterious SparcII Failures

From: Michael Urbanski (mikeu@mr_magoo.sbi.com)
Date: Wed Jun 24 1992 - 22:11:33 CDT


In my previous letter, I wrote:

Recently, we have had a problem with our SparcII workstations.
The workstation will die without apparent reason, usually when
the user is not at the machine. The only clues are as follows:

        1) The workstation cannot be pinged, logged into, ftp'd
           to, or telnetted to.

        2) One cannot use the L1-a reboot command. The only
           way to reset the machine is to switch the power
           off and on.

        3) If lockscreen is running, the lockscreen display
           freezes and no longer changes.

        4) Sometimes the green light on the front of the
           CPU is on and sometimes it is off.

        5) Often, these machines are running overnight jobs.

        6) The /var/adm/messages file offers no clues. It will
           only show the boot messages after the machine has been
           switched back on.

The consensus is that I need Sun patch # 100232-01. Here
is the info for that patch:

Patch-ID# 100232-01
Keywords: crash, cpu, screen, black, sparcstation 2, sunos, 4.1.1
Synopsis: SunOS 4.1.1: Sparcstation 2 crashes or whatchdog resets
Date: 28/Feb/91
 
SunOS release: 4.1.1
 
Unbundled Product:
 
Unbundled Release:
 
Topic: Sparcstation 2, SS2, crash, blank, screen, powercycle
 
BugId's fixed with this patch: 1050558

Architectures for which this patch is available: sun4c

Patches which may conflict with this patch:

Obsoleted by:

Problem Description:
Large applications that run fine under SunOS 4.1.1 on the SS-1 / SS-1+ and other SUN4
machines, crash the SS-2 machine running SunOS 4.1.1.

The symptoms are:

        screen goes black
        cpu light goes out
        L1-A does not work
        user typically has to power the machine off and restart machine again
        watchdog reset

Thanks goes out to:

        Mike.McCann@eng.clemson.edu (Mike McCann)
        mickey!carol@csvax.cs.caltech.edu (Carol Choy)
        MIESCH@taurus.dnet.ge.com
        jeff@cns.nyu.edu (Jeff Fookson)
        Jacques.Beigbeder@dmi.ens.fr (Jacques Beigbeder)
        Tom Slezak <slezak@llnl.gov>
        Dan Lorenzini <dal@gcm.com>

all of whom responded to my post. Thanks Everybody!

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