Date:         Mon, 24 Nov 1997 14:01:55 -0800
Reply-To:     "Christopher M. Smith" <csmith@SDSC.EDU>
Sender:       Vanagon mailing list <Vanagon@Gerry.SDSC.EDU>
From:         "Christopher M. Smith" <csmith@SDSC.EDU>
Subject:      VANAGON List - Back ONLINE
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

To one-n'-all:

The Vanagon list is officially back online, finally !
Feel free to begin posting.

Warning: There is quite a backlog of messages that were in queue for
delivery. I have removed some of them for the moment. I will add them back
in queue during the evenings/late nights when the list generally isn't
processing tons of messages. Otherwise the turn-around time on messages
should be rather fast.

For those interested: the culprit of our recent ails was a RAM chip on
it's last leg. Apparently, it worked fine during boot-up, but would fail
after a few hours or days. Since the chip was functional at boot-up, the
system would load routines into memory (like it should), but whenever the
chip finally died (intermittently), so did any program that
needed the routines it had in memory. Because different routines were
loaded onto this "bad" chip each time we rebooted, when the RAM chip
failed the error messages were always different. Only after working over
the system and chip intensely for the last week or so, was I able to get
the chip to fail permanently ... and figure out what was really happening.
Anyway, our server is working fine without the 16 MG RAM I removed.

Chris
vanagon list admin