on 2/15/03 1:10 PM, Perry E. Metzger at perry@piermont.com wrote:

> 
> Monroe Williams <monroe@criticalpath.com> writes:
>> On three NetBSD systems I administer, I occasionally see the console output
>> get wedged.  I've seen it happen at less than a week, a little over 60 days,
>> and a little over 120 days uptime.
> [...]
>> Has anyone else seen this happen?  It's possible that this is fixed in 1.6
>> (all these machines are running pre-1.6 kernels), but I'm curious if anyone
>> knows for sure.
>> 
>> For the record, the kernels I've seen this happen with are all ones I built,
>> but they're pretty close to GENERIC.  Two machines are running i386 1.5.2,
>> and one is running macppc 1.5ZC + some local patches.
> 
> I don't know if the problem is fixed in -current, but I would upgrade
> your boxes to at least 1.6STABLE to make it easier to try to deal with
> the problem -- developers are for the most part not running 1.5.2
> boxes.

I'd like to upgrade these machines to 1.6 release (for this and other
reasons), but two of them are production machines and the logistics of doing
the upgrades have thus far put me off.

I think it's possible to update a running system (reboot on the new kernel
and then carefully drop in the new userland binaries), but if I decide to go
that route I need to bring up a test box and do a dry run first.

> Is it possible for you to bring any of the machines down to ddb and
> poke around the system state, or to take a kernel core dump and look
> at what the state of the console device stuff is?

I've never dealt with kernel core dumps in any form.  Is there a way to take
one from a running system?

I'm also not that proficient with ddb, and I'm not sure how to get at it
when the console isn't working.

> Also, what architecture are you running?

>> Two machines are running i386 1.5.2,
>> and one is running macppc 1.5ZC + some local patches.

-- monroe
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monroe Williams                                  monroe@criticalpath.com