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Date:      Fri, 10 Nov 95 11:44:31 GMT
From:      nbc@cs.strath.ac.uk
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Catastrophic Failure!
Message-ID:  <9511101144.AA04106@simpson-02.cs.strath.ac.uk>

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Yes indeed, the inevitablilty we have come to associate with computers crashing
(they only do it when it's important they don't) has manifest itself yet again.

My P75 running FreeBSD had been up for 6 days, running flawlessly, until our
systems manager came along to see it with a view to setting up some similar
systems. The demo was going well; I showed him that a P75 with FreeBSD was
faster in most cases that an Alpha, and all were pleased. Until, that is,
I switched to another virtual screen (using fvwm) which had netscape, running
remotely from one of the aforementioned Alphas, on it.

And lo, disaster let loose! Netscxape failed to redraw its window! This
unforgivable event was followed a few seconds later by my deity-like machine
rebooting - and I mean *rebooting*. No kernel panics, no disk syncs, just
a good ol' reboot, like my Amiga does when a program plays core war.

Now, I'm not really bothered by this, but I thought it best to inform you
of this. I've no idea why this happened but I suspect it had something to
do with netscape, what with it being a flaky beta version. I'm running
the  2.1.0-951026-SNAP snapshot kernel on top of a 2.0.5 release, so
perhaps this has something to do with it?

Or perhaps it was the Alpha's revenge on my machine for being faster than it ;-)

Neil



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