Re: Alpha mystery! Only on Sundays??

"Doug Phillips" <dphill46@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:1172610559.133475.107400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

On Feb 27, 1:57 pm, f...@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hi all,

We've got a strange problem with our Alpha.
[...]
Strange fact #1: these errors all start on a Sunday morning!
Here are the 3 failure times, all are a Sunday:
11-FEB-2007 10:31:06.38
18-FEB-2007 09:27:22.19
25-FEB-2007 09:28:06.25

Fact #2: a simple reboot fixed the problem each time.
There were then no more disk errors for 7 days.

Fact #3: the *other* computer also had this problem one time.
That was on 19 Nov 2006, also a Sunday! It too was fixed
with a simple reboot, but it has not had any problems since then.

The odds that all 4 of these errors occur on the same day of week
is 7**3::1, not very likely.

But they did, and the likely cause is (as Rob said), external. And,
something that happens Sunday AM but not on other days. Could be in
your building or anyplace along the power grid if you don't have
sufficient power protection & conditioning.

If you don't have UPS' on the systems, get some (appropriately rated
models, of course). If you do, check them out; they might be old and
failing or no longer doing all of their job.

From experience, the majority of these types of problems are power
related.

------------------------------------------
(no more UPS wars, please)



A story from the Anchorage office of a former employer:
About once a month (as I recall) all the only computer in the office, a
MicroVAX, would reboot without any explanation. Digital field engineers
visited the site several times and could not find an explanation. This
came to be an expected event, although no one ever stated a prediction of
when it would next occur. Finally, when one employee was relaying the
story to a relative, who correlated dates and location and said it was
the result of training flights by the US Air Force. The story goes that
the employer, another government agency, made contact with the Air Force,
locally and through government channels and the flights over that area
ceased. The reboots also ceased.
Urban legend? Maybe. I never visited that office.

A second story, and definitely not a legend:
A formwer co-worker of mine visited another of the company's offices in
the SW. To his surprise, the office was in two apartments (side by side)
whose only external doors were sliding glass. The servers (MicroVAX and
Windows NT) were in one of the two small rooms in the back of one of the
apartments. The room also doubled as the break room, since that's where
they made the coffee and that had the microwave. Needless to say, the
people running that office lacked in the area of security and safety for
the critical functioning of their office, since they made money providing
a service requiring the computer applications to be available.
.