2.3.1 text corruption

[Royal Ontario Museum]

In article <3576 at ddsw1.MCS.COM> karl at ddsw1.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) writes:
>In article <1124 at jpusa1.UUCP> stu at jpusa1.chi.il.us (Stu Heiss,6312,6334,) writes:
>>In article <133 at unifax.UUCP> sl at unifax.UUCP (Stuart Lynne) writes:
>>-In article <26353 at lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> carlson at lll-winken.LLNL.GOV (Joe Carlson) writes:
>>-}2.3.1.  Basically it appears that the in-core version of certain heavily
>>-}used programs appears to get corrupted every once in a while. I believe that
>>-}I have eliminated hardware trouble as the cause of this.
>>-
>>-I have also seen this problem on another system with a flakey swap area.
>>-You might want to check that you don't have any bad blocks in your swap
>>-area.
>>
>>I have also observed this but never considered the possibility of a disk
>>problem.  I do recall some discussion about bad track remapping not
>>working for the swap area.  Is this related or does anyone from sco have
>>any further info?
>
>I have checked into this, and it's not the problem.  If it was, I would
>expect to see a disk error message preceeding the problems -- that has 
>never occurred here.
>
>We saw the problem too, but worse.  Not only would I get wierd crashes from
>some programs, but also TRAP IN SYSTEM MODE panics!  Moving around a couple 
>of boards seems to have fixed it.  If you have halfway flakey hardware, watch 
>out -- you'll get all kinds of wierd problems, none of which your POST or 
>diags will catch!
>
>I believe that the tape controller was interfering with the disk controller
I'm not sure if this is related to the above problem, but I,
too, have seen some weird things happen with 2.3.1.  In
particular, twice now I have had parts of disk files show up
in mail messages.  The first case was a record from a Foxbase
file and the second was some text information.  

I'll keep my eye on the hardware.


Mark T. Dornfeld
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queens Park
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
M5S 2C6

mark at utgpu!rom      - or -     romwa at utgpu