On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 11:58:28AM +0100, Alexander Koponen wrote: > > Hello! > > Congratulate me on my first summit to a mailinglist. =) > Here is a story about a couple of SparcStation4s. > > I have a SparcStation4 which I intended as server so I installed Debian > Woody on it - Base Install and ssh, make, gcc, and not much more. I put it > in my serverroom and it ran fine for a couple of days. Then it crashed so > I had to go there but since I had no keyboard and monitor hooked up to it > I couldnt see what was happening, and it did no use trying to plug it in > afterwards, so I had to powercycle the machine. I didn't mind much then, > but after two more crashes it started to bother me. 3 crashes in two > weeks. New to Debian I figured that Woody is bad so I installed > Potato. It ran fine for a whole week then same error. I looked in the > logs, didn't find anything. I put it up again and 2 days later (5th crash) > I said to myself "this computer has faulty hardware" and I replaced it > with another SparcStation4 with identical hardwaresetup. > > With my wrong intuition that Woody is bad I installed potato on it - base > and ssh, nothing else. However this one worked, yay! So I thought, a week > later it crashed. Remember, this is a different machine. So I went to > powercycle it and look more closely this time what happened. I found that > the logs had "tty1 respawn", "tty2 respawn", and so on loads of times! > Perhaps 200 entries an hour. Also the wtmp were huge, 10MB! The only > account was my account and I logged in say perhaps 10 times a day for a > week. Typing "last -20" took time. 5 minutes to type out the first 15 > entries then i gave up, It has problem parsing the wtmp file. So I let it > be, rebooted the machine and left it (this was yesterday). Now its the day > after and the new machine has crashed again... > > However, a friend of mine runs another SparcStation4 on the same network > not with identical hardware with Woody on it, he says he havent had any > problems... > I suspect he has a keyboard plugged in. If you are going to run headless, you have to fix /etc/inittab manually. Comment out the getty lines for tty[1-6] and, if you want a serial console, uncomment the ones for ttyS[12]. -- Mark
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