Subject: NCR PCI SCSI bugs/fixes? Help!
To: None <port-i386@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Michael L. VanLoon -- Iowa State University <michaelv@iastate.edu>
List: port-i386
Date: 01/21/1995 15:29:32
I'm using a Dell OmniPlex 66MHz Pentium machine at my new job with a
NCR PCI SCSI (53c810) card in it and two SCSI drives.  I'm running
NetBSD-1.0 that was supped off sun-lamp before the tree was turned
back into current, several weeks ago (sources and binaries from my own
home machine).  The machine was working wonderfully under light load.
We are running a news server on it, and ran a limited feed to it to
test things out.  Things were working great.

But, when we opened up the full feed, sending literally thousands of
articles an hour, things aren't working as well.  Twice in the last
two days the machine has died.

The first time it just started acting weird, like files had
disappeared.  Things were complaining about files and directories not
existing.  I went to the console and noticed a bunch of ccb timeout
messages had scrolled across it.  I promptly rebooted.  I lost several
files in the root filesystem, but nothing else.  I pulled them out of
a nightly backup file, and no harm was done.

This afternoon I came in, and the machine had faulted into the kernel
debugger, with some kind of error in the NCR printf code.  I rebooted
once again, with only minor filesystem damage.

However, I can't have the machine dieing every day with disk problems.
Does this sound like anything anyone else has dealt with, and maybe
fixed?  Urgent help would be much appreciated!  If there have been
fixes since 1.0, I'd be happy to hear about them.  I haven't been able
to follow the NetBSD lists much for the last month.

Thanks much...
				--Michael

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Michael L. VanLoon     michaelv@HeadCandy.com     michaelv@iastate.edu
  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x for PC/Mac/Amiga/etc.
     Working NetBSD ports: 386+PC, Mac, Amiga, HP300, Sun3, Sun4c, PC532
               In progress: DEC pmax (MIPS R2k/3k), VAX, Sun4m
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------