Watchdog reset balmed on dirty keyboard

[Elliott McCrory]

We were having a really obnoxious problem on our 4/260 (OS 4.0.3)
recently:  at a rate of about 2.5 times per (24-hour) day, our machine
would act as if it received a `stop-A' type watchdog reset, ie, the type
of reset you get when you enter a `stop-A' from the console keyboard.  It
kept getting worse.  Since we were working on a complex driver in the
kernal at the time, we assumed that we were screwing up in there.  But,
one morning, one of our Grad Students (hurray!) took the keyboard to a
source of compressed air, blew it out, rebooted, and since then everything
has been peachy.

The morals of this story are (1) the world would probably stop without
Grad Students, (2) Dirty Sun keyboards are *real bad*, and (3) really
complex problems often have really simple solutions.

Elliott McCrory
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Batavia, IL 60510
Mail net: mccrory at linac.fnal.gov (or, Vax address of mccrory at fnalc.fnal.gov)
Phone net: (708) 840-4414 or 4808