3130 Problems

[dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe]

In article <MbNzKhW00awQ9p3l95 at andrew.cmu.edu> vd09+ at andrew.cmu.edu (Vincent M. Del Vecchio) writes:
>Sorry to bother all of you 4D-type people, but...
>We have been having problems with a few 3130s that we have at a high
>school.  I have net access (through this account) and have been porting
>a variety of software to the machines.  Unfortunately, I have been able
>to crash the machine fairly easily.  If I run any program which is too
>large, it seems, the machine hangs.  It has happened to me compiling,
>with a compression program called "sqz", and is most easily demonstrated
>with emacs, by simply looking at a large file (several megs), which will
>work file, and then deleting a line, for example.  The machine will go
>into a dead state.  
sounds as if you might have a bad main memory board/chip--you might want
to swap memory boards (if you can) and see if you can isolate which one
might be failing....

>                    It will respond to pings and the terminal drivers
>will still work (you can watch control characters echo), but it is dead.
> It is also worth noting that editing the same file which causes the
>crash on either of two 4 meg machines works on an 8 meg, but larger
>files will also cause the 8 meg to crash.  It is possible that we
>haven't noticed these problems before because we didn't run anything
>large enough; the only other possibility is the shell that I ported
>(tcsh, using BSD4.4 sources to csh).  I had to make some strange
>modifications to the signal handling code to get it to work.  I believe
>we are running OS version 3.6.
so the obvious question here is, what happens when you just get onto
the machine running either straight vanilla SH or CSH shell?  can you 
still make it lock up doing the above???  at least this way you can 
isolate whether or not the behavior is related to the tcsh shell yer
using.

>
>Does anyone know what this is, or, more importantly, how to stop it from
>happening?
does this machine have a support contract?  if so, call 1 800/345-0222
(SGI's Technical Assistance Center) and log a call against the machine's
serial number.  if you don't have a support contract AND you don't get 
any other leads, you can always call in and open a call under a straight
Time and Materials billing scenario but be ready to provide the Call
Coordinator with a Purchase Order (PO) number.
>
>Thanks for any info.
>
>-Vincent Del Vecchio
>(vd09 at andrew.cmu.edu)
--
                                             daveus rattus   

                                   yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                              KOYAANISQATSI

   ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
       in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
         5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.