Brian D Chase wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Dann Lunsford wrote:
> 
> > Running 1.4.1 on a VS3100m76, 32MB, several inboard non-DEC SCSI
> > drives.  Machine ran VMS 5.5 fine, till a few days ago, so I'm pretty
> > sure the hardware is OK.  NetBSD, however has been crashing *reguarly*
> > every day at 0315.  Crash has been wildly variant, no single address
> > or type.  I've traced it down to *something* in /etc/security.
> > Haven't had time to do anything else. Renaming /etc/security stopped
> > the crashes, machine has been up all night, for the first time.
> 
> Have you started with the cron job being run each night at 3:15am?
Yup, that's where I started, and how I traced it to /etc/security :-)
(I'm just a newbie with NetBSD; been messing with Unix in various forms
for quite a while, now.  Don't really like to think how long...:-)  )
HOWEVER, tonight, while hacking on one of my VMS boxen, a thought 
hit me, regarding memory.  I had 32MB, but 8 of that was the original
memory from when I got the box, so what the heck, I took it out then 
tried everything that caused crashes before.  NOTHING!  No /etc/security
crashes, no inetd cores, nothing!  The only thing that still goes wrong
is a "tar tzvf etc.tgz"  where etc.tgz is in the 1.4.1 VAX sets dir on
ftp.netbsd.org. That generates a gzip.core every time.  The other sets
are ok, so I'm fairly sure it's something in that set.  Will try
to download the set again later; if that memory was bad... 

My *tentative* conclusion is that the 8MB I removed were bad.  Anybody 
got a memory test?  Another possibility is that there's some sort of 
32MB boundary problem in VS3100m76's.  My money is on bad memory (I
mean that literally, I'm putting in an order for 8MB to replace this
from Keyways).

So, thanks for the advice.  Hope I didn't lower the S/N ratio too
much...

Dann Lunsford