DUMP: SIGSEGV() ABORTING!

[Jim Davidson]

In article <1753 at shodha.enet.dec.com> alan at shodha.enet.dec.com ( Alan's Home for Wayward Notes File.) writes:



Yes!  We have the exact same problem on 2 3100's and 2 2100's!  I
thought we were alone!


>In article <1990Oct3.171146.4158 at Neon.Stanford.EDU>, farhad at CS.Stanford.EDU (Farhad Shakeri) writes:
>}
>} [ Dump fails with a segmentation fault. ]
>}

>	I have two questions back at you.  Are you using the
>	'u' flag to update /etc/dumpdates?  Does the file
>	/etc/dumpdates really exist?  If the answer to the
>	first question is yes and the second no, create one
>	and see if the problem goes away.

I can answer this:  It makes ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE!  In fact,
if the /etc/dumpdates file exists and is not empty, doing

% dump w

to list file systems to dump will give "Segmentation fault (core
dumped)" This is a long standing problem I have had and Dec has never been
able to solve it.  Just today I showed this annoyance to a
hardware guy from Dec (here for another reason) and he thinks it's
software.  However, I was on the phone for hours with Atlanta 
a few months back to no avail.  My attempted solution was to simply
tar off what I needed and install straight from the book Ultrix 4.0.
This changed nothing!  Be assured, your dump image is fine- you
can call Atlanta and compare the output of

% sum /usr/bin/dump

with your machine and a machine at the hands of the Dec support
person.  I'm positive they'll match.  The very strange thing
is that it seems to be a bug that spreads- it started on
a 3100 we had on loan, spread to a second loaner 3100, and
is now infesting two 2100's we've bought.

Ths truth of the matter is that we are mostly a Sun shop here
and the DecStations have always been a low priority for us so
this problem has been ignored.  We don't really care if these
machines all crash terribly without a backup, as I've said the
3100's are loaners and if I had my way we'll send the two
2100's back for some vt1300 X-terminals.

>	If it does PLEASE, PLEASE submit an SPR.  Bugs like
>	this should have disappeared ages ago.

How exactly does one submit an SPR?  Better yet, please
call me at (805)893-2896 and I'll be happy to discuss the
problem with you directly (or maybe trade in options?).


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Davidson					jimbo at Nsfitp.ITP.UCSB.Edu
Institute for Theoretical Physics		jimbo at sbitp.bitnet
University of California at Santa Barbara


--
--------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jim Davidson					jimbo at sbitp.bitnet
  Institute for Theoretical Physics		jimbo at sbitp.ucsb.edu
  UC Santa Barbara