Intermittent Login Problems

[Eric A. Pearce]

 We have a Iris 4D running 3.2.1 with:

 2 25 MHZ IP7 Processors
 FPU: MIPS R2010A/R3010 VLSI Floating Point Chip Revision: 2.0
 CPU: MIPS R2000A/R3000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.0
 Data cache size: 64 Kbytes
 Instruction cache size: 64 Kbytes
 Main memory size: 16 Mbytes
 GT Graphics option installed
 Integral Ethernet controller
 Integral SCSI controller WD33C93
 Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
 Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
 Tape drive: unit 7 on SCSI controller 0: QIC 150

 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?

 -e

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Eric Pearce eap at bu-pub.bu.edu
 Boston University Information Technology      
 111 Cummington Street  Boston MA 02215  617-353-2780 voice  617-353-6260 fax