>> >
>> >I scrounged up a Sun3/50 with PROM revision 2.6 and have finally been
>> >able to reproduce the hang described above.  (I had an old 3/50 that
>> >Adam sent me, but had to displace something to make room for it...)>
>
>> Ok, I've got a 2.3 rom on my sun 3/50M. Booted just fine! Cool, now I
>> have no native sun stuff running this machine.
>> [....] 
>> I boot a completely diskless machine serving off my 486/33 sitting 3 inches 
>> above the sun3 on my desk. The problems I'm seeing is I go to boot and
>> it works about 50% of the time. The other 50% it randomly core dumps 
>> something in the boot process with illegal instruction calls and then
>> once that starts most any other program starts core dumping as well. 
>> Any ideas? The machine will pass the complete diags from the prom.
>> 
>> James
>
>Well, I don't know if I have any idea why it's doing it but I can report 
>the same problem w/ my machine.  I've got a 3/50 with the 2.3 prom and a 
>486/33 running linux.  Sometimes it would hang at getty, and core was 
>dumping all over the place.  I did took some stuff out of the rc files 
>and this helped a little bit but still couldn't have the machine up for 
>more than a day or so.....
>
>P.S. After I got a scsi drive for my machine and put everything on that, 
>everything worked great, no core dumps or anything, just a slow scsi (for 
>now).
>
>Trent
>trent@rmci.net

Hey, I am glad someone else has seen odd behavior with a 3/50 and prom
version 2.3 [I was *really* beginning to suspect a defective machine].
I run this Sun diskless and use a NetBSD/i386 box as a fileserver.  I
know that the Ethernet card on the fileserver is *way* slow, and
thought that it was perhaps related to swapping over NFS, but I don't
know for sure.  Basically, I can always make a compile of 'tcsh' drop
core, usually before it actually gets to compiling anything
[i.e. which it is generating the various header files, basically a
couple of 'egrep's and a 'sed' in a single pipeline].  After it starts
dropping core, *any* binary which uses shared libraries will drop
core.  Static binaries seem to work better.

Sometimes it will just start to drop core on boot [important things
like getty and the like].





Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org   http://anduin.eldar.org