*BSD News Article 86200


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
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From: tomh@metrics.com (Tom Haapanen)
Subject: Re: BSDI 2.1 STOPING RANDOMLY
Organization: Software Metrics Inc.
Message-ID: <E3L3qu.D6o@metrics.com>
References: <3233cbc4.17400812@news.ni.net> <E2H0pC.I5@metrics.com>
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 11:25:42 GMT
Lines: 31
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:5514


tomh@metrics.com (Tom Haapanen) writes:
> Our BSDI system has been wonderfully stable, but all of a sudden, about
> a week and a half ago, it started rebooting randomly, easily 5-6 times
> a day, with no panics, no messages in logs, no symptoms of any kind.
> And *really* nothing had changed!
> 
> We eventually tracked this down to a failing power supply -- it would just
> cut out randomly, and all of a sudden the BIOS boot screen would appear.
> Ouch!
> 
> We couldn't get the right power supply quickly, so as a temporary workaround
> we ran with an "external" supply -- a loose power supply sitting on a 
> cardboard box next to the open case, with all power cables connected to
> the appropriate places.  This fixed the random reboots, but now we were 
> getting the hanging symptoms similar to yours ... it would just stop
> responding.  This *might* have been due to lack of grounding and/or static
> accumulation -- not sure.
> 
> Finally we got the right power supply in on Friday morning, and the system
> has now been stable for 48 hours without a glitch, so I'm hoping that we
> have eliminated the issue.

Just a quick note to say that we've been up solid for over three weeks now
after replacing the power supply and closing the case -- so don't ignore
your power supply as a potential source of flakiness!

-- 
[ /tom haapanen -- tomh@metrics.com -- software metrics inc -- waterloo, ont ]
[ "how's it going, mr. peterson?"                                            ]
[ "it's a dog eat dog world, and i'm wearing milkbone underwear."  -- cheers ]