We just wasted a bunch of our time and Transarc's with a fiendishly
simple problem.
We have removed the fancy graphics adapters from our RS6000 AFS
servers and are using RS-232 terminals as consoles. On one of our
servers, the RS-232 connector came halfway unplugged - "receive" and
"transmit" were still connected, but "DTR" was not.
AIX apparently ignores DTR until it goes multiuser, so it looked as
though the console was working. However, every process which tried to
write to the console (including the AFS "fileserver" process) blocked
quite thoroughly when it couldn't write to the console!
This took embarrassingly long to find. As a matter of fact, I'm amazed
that I'm willing to admit to this nonsense in public!
A hardware solution to this is to securely fasten to the console
RS-232 cable an adapter which passes "receive" and "transmit", but
jumpers the modem signals so that the RS6000 serial port always thinks
it has a working terminal attached. Simply fastening the cable to the
terminal is not sufficient since taking the terminal offline, turning
its power off, or unplugging its power would still cause the server to
fail. Unfortunately, so would unplugging the RS6000 end of the cable
even with the adapter.
Perhaps there is a software solution. If so, I would use both.
Caveat system administrator.
-Rick
--
|Rick Cochran 607-255-7223|
|Cornell Materials Science Center [EMAIL PROTECTED]|
|E20 Clark Hall, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853 cornell!msc.cornell.edu!rick|
