Help: Dell SYSVR4

[Tin "Man" Le]

In article <3090 at sixhub.UUCP> davidsen at sixhub.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>In article <1991Feb2.195744.15339 at szebra.uucp> tin at szebra.uucp (Tin Le) writes:
>
>| Be prepared for lots of problems.  I have a Dell 486/33 box with their
>| S5R4 for a week now, and have had 2 panics (and I haven't even started
>| trying yet!).  
>
>  I would love to know what you are doing... I had two beta versions and
>an alpha version of V.4 from three vendors, and never saw a panic. We
>had a Dell V.4 loading from tape, being an NFS server for Xenix
>machines, and running a scanner in direct i/o port access mode under DOS
>under X, all in an 8MB machine. We set a record for paging, but it all
>worked, reasonably fast, and nary a problem.
>

  I wish I could provide more details but as I noted, I was not ready
  at the time to test the system.  The panics kinda took me by surprise
  so to speak.

  The first time was when we were experimenting with DOS Merge.  We were
  all running it over the network to an xterm on our workstation.

  The second time was when we were transferring our files to the newly
  created accounts on the machine.  Several ftp sessions were going, I
  believe one person had NFS mounted his home dir on the Dell box and
  was tar'ing his files across.

  There is one problem that is driving me bonker.  There is a bug in
  the console driver (or the screen blanker).  It does not matter whether
  I am  running X or the console is just sitting at the login prompt.
  After some period of time (don't know how long), but the console
  "blank" out (i.e. go dark).  From then on, it is not possible (as far
  as I can determine) to turn it back on except to reboot the thing.
  Note that the machine is still alive, i.e. I can rlogin to it and use
  it.  Just the console display is GONE.  The funny thing is, I can
  actually login at the console (if it was sitting at the login prompt),
  but I just can't see what I am doing.  This bug is very consistent and
  is bad enough that we just got tired of rebooting it.

  Since the machine sits in a back room and most of us just rlogin to it
  anyway, we have not done much about it.  By the way, I've tried various
  things to try bringing the console back.  Some of these are, logging
  on at the console and trying to run X (hoping that will bring the
  screen alive...no such luck), or running 'reset', 'tset', etc...

-- Tin

-- 
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. Tin Le                    Work Internet: tin at smsc.Sony.COM
. Sony Microsystems              UUCP: {uunet,mips}!sonyusa!tin
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