getting info after a crash

From: Peyton Bland <bland_at_umich.edu>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 09:15:07 -0400

Hi,

We are running 4.0F on a DS20 and have had no strange problems for the
first 6 months of operation. But within the last 2 weeks, the system has
twice stopped dead -- no response at the console or via the network. The
console screen is black, nothing diagnostic is written to
/usr/adm/binary.errorlog or messages or to any of the syslog logfiles, and
the front panel display showed only "AlphaServer DS20". Is there anywhere
else I can look for a clue as to what happened? (If not, I guess I'll have
to learn how to read a crash dump!)

But why did it crash? If we were using the deferred mode of swap
allocation, could that cause a crash of this sort? We are actually using
immediate mode on this system (ie, a sym link exists from /sbin/swapdefault
to /dev/rz8b), but I've always been curious about the ramifications of
using deferred mode (which we use on other systems). By the way, we have
2Gb memory and over 7Gb swap on this system.

I'll summarize anything interesting that I learn.

Thanks,
Peyton

Peyton Bland
University of Michigan, Radiology
voice: 734-647-0849
FAX: 734-764-8541
e-mail: bland_at_umich.edu
URL: http://www.med.umich.edu/dipl/
Received on Fri Oct 20 2000 - 13:16:07 NZDT

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