diskless clients hanging

[Eugene Amdur]

Has anyone else seen this?  We have four diskless 4D/20's served from
a 4D/340VGX.  Periodically (two to three times a day) the diskless machines 
hang.  Users are tipically running "man", "su", or even nothing.  NeWS is 
always running though.  These machines have 8Megs of memory and 20Megs of 
swap space each.  

Everything is running version 3.3.1 of the OS.  There is one strange oddity.
Whenever the machines are reset (by the button next to the on/off switch), the
time is reset to Dec 31 1969.  I`m not sure if this has anything to do with it
though.

There are other things.  We used to run our clients at 3.3 with a /share as
setup buy SGI's clinst.  But we found our clients hanging, so I switched to
a shared /usr and 3.3.1 of the OS (shared with the server) with programs that 
are machine dependent linked to /private (most of the machine dependent programs
on the PIs are from version 3.3 of the OS including the news_server and the
graphics libraries).  The hanging didn`t go away with this modification though.

Finally, our 340VGX hasn't hung yet.  Nor have other diskfull 4D/25's.
Any clues?

--gene
gene at vis.toronto.edu (Internet)
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