strange problems (looking for help)

[Steve Hubert]

I wonder if anyone recognizes the following symptoms as symptoms of
something concrete I can try to fix.  We are running 4.3BSD on a
VAX11/785.  The disks are 3 RA81s on a single UDA.  The uda device
driver is version 6.12 from Berkeley (9/16/85) which seems to be equal
to or derived from a DEC driver from January 84.  I am not getting any
kernel error messages at all.  Here is symptom number 1:

% ls -l data
-rw-r--r--  1 pcraig     4480000 Apr 17 11:19 data

% cmp data data
data data differ: char 1777665, line 30650

% cmp data data
data data differ: char 1654785, line 28531

% cmp data data
data data differ: char 1683457, line 28955

--------------
Here is symptom number 2:

% cc -DBSD4 -DUWASH -DTLOG -c ckwart.c
"ckwart.c", line 391: warning: undeclared initializer name fp
"ckwart.c", line 391: warning: undeclared initializer name nam
"ckwart.c", line 391: warning: undeclared initializer name cont
"ckwart.c", line 391: warning: undeclared initializer name siz
"ckwart.c", line 392: syntax error
"ckwart.c", line 396: cannot recover from earlier errors: goodbye!

% cc -DBSD4 -DUWASH -DTLOG -c ckwart.c
  (ok this time, no changes to ckwart.c, it compiles correctly)

Something similar to this has happened several times.

-------------

All of our symptoms could be explained by bad reads.  That is, if we
don't always get the same data off the disk when we read it we would
get the symptoms we're getting.  However, we have never gotten any sort
of disk read error messages on the console or anywhere else.  Thanks.

Steve Hubert
 Dept. of Stat., U. of Wash, Seattle
 {decvax,ihnp4,ucbvax!lbl-csam}!uw-beaver!entropy!hubert
 hubert%entropy at uw-beaver.arpa