Intermittent Login Problems
Brendan Eich
brendan at illyria.wpd.sgi.com
Wed Feb 28 19:34:41 AEST 1990
In article <1990Feb27.171242.7976 at hellgate.utah.edu>, brian at cs.utah.edu (Brian Sturgill) writes:
> > [. . .] The behavior seems random. The only unusual message that I could
> > find in SYSLOG was:
> >
> > Feb 21 14:41:22 panda grcond[10521]: In limbo
> > Feb 21 14:42:07 panda grcond[10521]: Tried and failed 3 times to download
> > graphics subsystem
> >
> > I asked our usual service person and the SGI hotline people and nobody had
> > seen this message before.
>
> The main idea I get is that it is odd that SGI does not know about this
> problem. ALL of our 4D/20's, and our 240GTX have this problem.
Do you get the "Tried and failed 3 times to download graphics subsystem"
message on all of your 4D/20's, or only some? On your 240GTX? The reason
I ask is because very different versions of the grcond program are shipped
for different models, according to their graphics hardware, and >only the
240GTX version contains the "Tried and failed" message<.
Has someone inadvertently copied the 240GTX's /etc/gl/grcond to a 4D/20?
Or does the message you quote in fact occur only on your 240GTX?
> Looking at our SYSLOGs shows that this occurs 4.51 times per machine per day.
> Often just before the limbo message we get:
>
> ... grcond[5015]: Child process /etc/gl/pandora exited with status 0
This SYSLOG entry was intended to be informational (LOG_INFO) only, and does
not necessarily indicate a problem. Logging successful exit status does not
seem useful; perhaps this unduly alarming message should be eliminated.
> I do not know if the exact same mechanism is responsible, but we also
> had the graphics servers crash so frequently (leaving a very large /core) that
> I installed /core as a symlink to /dev/null.
The graphics server meaning /bin/news_server? Was there any SYSLOG message
from news_server (rather than from grcond) at the time of the coredump?
> It seems odd that it is not occuring regularly at SGI on their machines.
> (Perhaps they have not upgraded to 3.2 yet?)
We're running 3.2, 3.2.1, 3.2.2, and what will become 3.3 in engineering,
on hundreds of Iris 4Ds. Generally, engineers install and run a release
long before any customers see it.
The only troubles I've had with news_server, grcond, and microcode have
been during development, when I used mismatched versions. I've heard, but
not seen, of GT/GTX microcode problems that occasionally result in SYSLOG
messages and graphics crashes. I've had no such problems with my 4D/20 in
more than a year; I've been running 3.2 for about six months.
> Brian
Brendan Eich
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
brendan at sgi.com
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