Well, day before yesterday, Mnut went down thrice.. Yesterday, it
        died at ~7:30pm. It's still shot.

        I had wondered a few minutes earlier: Yapp had reported something
        about a UNK Error (?) and File Allocation Error (?) before hitting
        some sort of "time warp" in a few confs.

        I went thru one conf simply using 'q' so the flags would update.
        I dropped out of Yapp, re-entered, and not only were NO errors
        reported, but the rest of the confs were up to date.

        Have at it, folks..

109 responses total.

        I went over to Supreme HQ at the NEW Center about 9:30
yesterday evening.  The M-Net console was displaying the Award
Software, Inc. System Configurations screen.  This shows, among
other things, how much memory the System has.  Below that screen
appeared:

        Non-System disk or disk error
       Replace and press any key when ready

So I pressed a key and got the same error message.
        Then I rebooted by doing control-alt-delete.  M-Net hung
at the same screen, with the same message.
        Finally, I pressed the "reset" button on the tower.  It went
through the memory test, and then to the System Configurations screen--
and the same error message!
        I called Linda Clippert.  She said that either we had a bad
disk, or that "the operating system is missing."  She thought someone
might have erased it.
        Has someone stolen M-Net's brain?

Why is it that m-net goes down like this and has
repeated crisises? It's like someone is trying to sabotage it 
or something.

        BSDI, yapp and elm wouldn't let me enter either an item or mail,
        but I had a list of !w (showing a load average above 21!) and the
        /var/mail directory: we had huge amounts of mail being handled.

        Several users - in the first screen - had 7 figure mail sizes.

        sendmail and popmail were running like made, and then... *POOF*

        System died.

        Oh yeah, in the first 17 minutes we had over 20 indian users.

M-Net is back up again!  Turns out Leeron Kopelman had left a disk
in Drive A accidentally, and when M-Net had one of its "routine"
crashes yesterday at 6:08 p.m., it couldn't reboot itself because
of the disk.  Hahaha!!

M-net probably has a sick disk (probably sd2 - a micropolis).  There are
scads of sd2 errors in the system error logs, and the periodic intervals
where the system hangs, but still echoes characters, are because the
scsi bus has hung, & has to be reset.

The usual things to do are to check cabling, cooling, and to be sure
there's a fresh backup.  If there's nothing obviously wrong with sd2,
then it will probably be necessary to figure out how to try running the
system without it.  It's probably best to plan on replacing it, tho if
you're lucky, you'll be able to get the old drive fixed.

As of fifteen minutes ago, M-Net was not answering on 994-6333 or
996-4644.  So much for uptime.

i guess it's been up since last night, leeron posted a response in
item #21, response 57 in agora

        Hmmm... It replied to neither Telnet or the Dialins - last night
        or today.

        Doctor:         "You ever have this before?"
        Patient:        "Yes, doc"
        Doctor:         "Well, You got it again."

I just got back from Supreme HQ.  The modems were turned off.
There was a note from Leeron on the console dated October 30 at
7:20 a.m. saying the xternal disk (sd2) is flaking out and the
System won't reboot.
        Soo - we're still down!

At 1:30 this afternoon I dropped off the ailing disk to Jim Knight
at Medstat.  He said he would check to see if the disk's power supply
was causing the problem, or if it was the disk itself.  Then he put
on his surgical mask and took out a saw...

<maus cries>

If wurst comes to wurst, a new 3 GB from Jemmie is only about $450.
(I never sausage a good deal anywhere before.)

        I'm sick and tired of systems with disk problems!!  with
grex and M-Net down for days, I'm repeatedly hoping I can get a
few minutes to fprward my e-mail to my ISP, although it might
shoot up the load.  Please keep us updated, dpc.

Well...it appears that I must check in here for any news until M-Nut comes
back up...I hope it gets fixed soon..I hate doing nothing but housework when
I get home in the morning....<grumble>...

Don't suppose the life of that drive was shortened by all of the paging, was
it?

Good news from Jim Knight!  It seems that only the disk's power
supply was bad.  We are in the process of buying a new case for the
disk drive, which includes a new power supply.  It will cost about
$100.  If we get the new case in the next couple of hours, and Jim
or Leeron can mount the old disk in it, I can run it back to the
NEW Center, plug in the cables, and reboot the System.
        If we can't get the case today, M-Net will probably be down
until Monday.

Ay!  Hurry up...I'm so bored.

maybe mnet should buy abackup disk anyway,just tobe on the safeside.

        You're joking..  Right?
        Are you aware of M-Net's financial state?
        Dang, I kinda wish I could help out, because I have all
        this free time and know a buncha shit about hardware.

        Free time and a buncha shit is what we have ;-)


        Meanwhile, I presume that the last 2 hours have been unproductive.

argh

I want my damn M-net

Hmmmm...I guess it's still not up..and it's now saturday morning...hopefully
it'll be up sometime later today...well...I guess I'll just have to do some
more housework...<grumble>

        Saturday at 6:00pm and the system is still down.

It doesnt look like it is going to be up until monday

        Better keep a close eye on that disk;  I've found power problems often
tend to cascade down into media problems, especially if a PS surges or dips
during a write.  And sd0 was a busy little puppy.

re #25:  What did you do to it? ;)

I looked at it with my ugly face, aaron.

Actually, if you want to be technical about it. I gave the disk the evil
eye. It is hard to give the evil eye over the phone. 

        
        I would like some *updates* please....
        Anytime this millenium would be great!

Please see response #16 for the latest update. Mnet will be down until
monday at least

The joy of "just in time" inventories....  Also known as, "three days too 
late."

IM HAVING M-NET WITHDRAWLS!!!  HELP.

join a grex conference .... enter party .... it'll take most of the
pain away ....

I guess I'm surprised that you'd let a little thing like a dead power
supply keep you down.  The obvious thing to do would be to take an old
IBM XT, mount the drive in that, cannibalize the old disk drive case to
get the scsi cable connectors, & run the drive that way until the new
case comes in.  It'll look ugly as sin, but it will work.

Then again, it seems to be my thing to do horrible little kludges.  I
remember architecting a really bizarre arrangement for the Altos, which
involved leaving the CPU card sticking straight up into the air, so that
the 80 M drive wouldn't flake out (the early ones weren't shielded well
enough, and were apparently vulnerable to electromagnetic interference
from the CPU card.)  You definitely don't want to know where grex's "/a"
drive is currently located.

has m-nut been down?

gee,  wonder jerryr :)

        RE 35:
        I *do* want to know, just out of curiosity.
        Btw, Someone refresh my mind.  Which devices in /dev/
        are the hard disks?  The floppies?  The CD-ROM (if any)?
        I haven't learned this yet..  Modems?  TBU (might be
        /dev/nst*)?  Any pointers would be great.

Actually, it is sd2--the external drive that sat in the box on top
of the M-Box tower--which is having problems.  We need to purchase
a case, and weren't able to do so by the close of business on Friday.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss