Re: "Mysterious" system crashes

Doug Phillips wrote:

[snip]

Electrical service, power supply, disk (or controller) and mother-
board are the only things I've ever had fail that caused reboots (or
crashes) and didn't leave some kind of trail. Disk problems usually
present other symptoms, too. Power service problems have been the
number one cause of "mysterious" behaviors I've seen and a UPS has
usually made them go away.

One of my customer sites was having occasional random reboots. (About
once a month.) Only one system was affected of the 6 on site (and
hundreds of others we have nothing to do with.) Telco, giant UPS,
standby generators, the works.

I think it was memory or a memory daughter card they ultimately
replaced and the reboots stopped happening. I don't remember if
this was an ES40 or an AlphaServer 4100.

And I could be misremembering and confusing this incident with
another one (at the same site), with one situation creating
crash dumps that the field service org (not HP) couldn't diagnose,
and the other situation causing reboots without a dump.

And anyway, I think this did not ultimate turn out to be the cause,
but it seemed a reasonable hypothesis at the time:: A bad OPC
card or cable. The theory was an intermittent short was causing
the firmware to think someone had pressed the HALT or RESET
button on the front!

It seemed like such a nice theory that I've been saving it.
Maybe you've got the bad OPC. Try reseating the ribbon cables
if possible, and or wiggling while the system is up to see if
it causes a crash.

Or maybe you've (Brad) got a cat that likes sleeping on the keyboard
and presses ctrl/P followed by B!

HTH





--
John Santos
Evans Griffiths & Hart, Inc.
781-861-0670 ext 539
.