Intermittent Login Problems

[Brian Sturgill]

>  We have a Iris 4D running 3.2.1 with:
>  It recently started behaving strangely - When trying to log in from the console,
>  the screen will go blank for a couple of minutes and then return to the login 
>  prompt.   The behavior seems random.   The only unusual message that I could 
>  find in SYSLOG was:
> 
>  Feb 21 14:41:22 panda grcond[10521]: In limbo
>  Feb 21 14:42:07 panda grcond[10521]: Tried and failed 3 times to download 
>  graphics subsystem
> 
>  I asked our usual service person and the SGI hotline people and nobody had 
>  seen this message before.
> 
>  Any ideas?

The main idea I get is that it is odd that SGI does not know about this
problem.  ALL of our 4D/20's, and our 240GTX have this problem.
Looking at our SYSLOGs shows that this occurs 4.51 times per machine per day.
Often just before the limbo message we get:

	... grcond[5015]: Child process /etc/gl/pandora exited with status 0

I do not know if the exact same mechanism is responsible, but we also
had the graphics servers crash so frequently (leaving a very large /core) that
I installed /core as a symlink to /dev/null.

It seems odd that it is not occuring regularly at SGI on their machines.
(Perhaps they have not upgraded to 3.2 yet?)

Brian

(Sorry if I sound grouchy, but I have been preparing a report about
our problems with SGI machines for the last 2 days, and am quite
annoyed about the number of problems we are having.)