The long saga of making my recent KA655 acquisition work
continues! It's been mostly smooth sailing since I got
a decent Plextor drive, but there's one persistent problem.
Under VMS 7.3, after a longish period of inactivity (I've
seen it after a few hours, but I've not been able to
narrow it down beyond that), it seems to just kind of go
out to lunch. VMS is still *running*... if I have a
Telnet session running MONITOR, the clock will still update
and the activity meters still move (a little; they show
very little activity, but that's expected since there's not
a lot going on on the machine yet). But if I terminate
MONITOR (it responds interactively to ctrl-C, etc) and try
to run anything else (say, HELP), it stops responding.
Other terminals are totally unresponsive. If I try to
open a Telnet session, TCP connects but no other traffic
happens.
This also happens if I turn TCP/IP off. I'm running with
16 MB RAM, which should be enough for a machine that's not
really running much yet, and if I were having memory issues
I would expect things like existing MONITOR sessions to
have serious problems.
The only other correlation I can think of is that this
seems to happen most when I've just installed a layered
product, so it could have something to do with the CD
still being mounted. On the other hand, I tend to leave
the machine alone and unattended for long periods of time
for product installs, so correlation is necessarily not
very trustworthy here.
I can still issue a break from the terminal and boot again
from the console firmware, so that still seems fine.
If anyone has any idea what might be going on here, I'm
all ears.
- Dave