SUMMARY: Sparc-2 freezes

From: Narendra Mehta (naren@sce.carleton.ca)
Date: Mon Oct 26 1992 - 16:09:00 CST


Sorry for the late summary and thanks for all the replies.

Naren
-----

My original query:

I have three sparc-2's (bought during the last 3+ months, out of
warranty) which freezes every 2-3 days. Keyboard is dead, L1-A does
not work, remote logins do not work, ping does not work. The only
recourse is to power off/on the machine. The LED in the front is lit.
All the three machines are running SunOS 4.1.2, standard configuration
of 32MB memory, 424MB disk and 19" mono. Anyone noticed similar
problems? I had similar symptoms on some other machines when I was
running previous release of SunOS (4.1.1 or 4.0.3, can't remember).
That problem was solved when someone pointed me to an appropriate
patch to apply. Anyone seen this problem on 4.1.2? Any suggestion?
Only lockd patch rev -08 has been applied.
---------
Summary of responses:

 . Ian MacPherson (macphed@dvinci.usask.ca) has the following to say:
      We had this problem as well - it is a hardware problem and the mother
      boards had to be replaced. Perhaps you could convince your Sun rep that
      this is a manufacturing error, and as defective machines, should be
      replaced free-of-charge outside the warranty period. (Not much chance,
      but it might work.)

I have tried most of the suggestions that follow, but none of them
worked. Finally, I moved the cpu board to another sparc-2 and the
problem moved to the new machine. So, I am inclined to agree with
Ian. Let me think of some nice words for my sales rep. and sun...

Other responses.

 . Apply 100232-01
      When I had exactly the same symptoms when running 4.1.1, I had
      applied this patch and it fixed the problem. I think this patch
      was meant only for 4.1.1. The bug id #1050558 is supposed to
      have been fixed in 4.1.2 according to the release notes.
 . Overlapping disk partitions
      Nope, I checked. There are another 12 sparc-2s which have
      exactly the same partition info.
 . Install 100303-02 (system freezes using loopback interface)
      I gave this a try, did not help.
 . Perhaps xnews server is causing the problem?
      Don't think so. Some of the machines just freeze during the
      night, even when there is no other activity.
 . Bad hard disk?
      Well, the system runs to run fine for couple of days.
 . Perhaps screenblanker is causing the problem?
      Killed the screenblanker on one of the machine, did not help.

 . Remove following entries from crontab:

      15 3 * * * find / -name .nfs\* -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} \; -o -fstype
nfs -prune
      30 3 * * * find / -name core -type f -exec rm -f {} \; -o -fstype nfs -prune

      I did not actually try this. All my sparc-2s have exactly the
      same partition info, and same root/user files and same nfs mounted
      file systems. So, I assumed this would not fix my problem.
      

-- 
Narendra Mehta        | Carleton University, Systems & Computer Eng. Dept.,
naren@sce.carleton.ca | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:51 CDT