Okay, it's not really a summary. Here's the original message.
>
> Ah, once again I turn to this list for assistance. Here's the situation.
> I have a Sparc20. The 'uname -a' shows:
>
> SunOS vulcan 4.1.4 2 sun4m
>
> The machine is an NIS client. We run automount.
>
> When I type 'openwin' after logging in, the screen flickers. The top
> half of the screen shows the OpenWindows backgroup. The bottom part
> becomes black. The mouse cursor is a 'busy' icon (the circle) and
> responds to mouse movement. The keyboard is dead and nobody can rlogin
> to the machine. Even 'STOP-A' doesn't do anything. A hard boot
> resets the machine.
>
> I'm not seeing any errors in /var/adm/messages or on the console window
> upon boot. The OpenWindows is a local (i.e. not mounted from elsewhere)
> copy.
>
> The SunSolve CD is not helping, nor is the man page on openwin. I've
> installed patches 100444-76, 100448-03, 100452-72 and 100478-01,
> to no avail.
>
> One of my users mentioned to me this morning that this problem has
> been occurring for months. Unfortunately this means that I can't
> tell if a recent change caused this situation or not.
>
> Is there any way to run OpenWindows in a 'debug' mode so I can see
> what's going on? Does anyone have any other ideas as to what's causing
> this?
>
Thanks to Michael Pavlov for pointing out that the 'openwin' command
is a shell script. What can I say? It's Monday. After 'sh -x'ing the
script, I determined that it was crashing in the call to 'xinit'.
I was considering my options when several people pointed out that
they needed the machine in a hurry.
Thanks to Jim Harmon for reminding me to check the cable itself. I
did and the cable was fine.
Because I had users screaming about the machine, I opted for the
fastest, although less than thorough, solution: I blew away /usr/openwin
and copied that directory from another machine which was working.
This seems to have solved the problem and gotten the users off my
back.
Thanks for the advice!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:57 CDT