Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site myrias.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utcsri!ubc-vision!alberta!myrias!ggc
From: ggc@myrias.UUCP (Gilles Chartrand)
Newsgroups: net.rumor
Subject: Re: Horror stories
Message-ID: <227@myrias.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Mar-86 11:10:19 EST
Article-I.D.: myrias.227
Posted: Mon Mar 24 11:10:19 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Mar-86 15:25:18 EST
References: <1060@loral.UUCP> <3344@sun.uucp> <500@utastro.UUCP> <638@mmm.UUCP>
Organization: Myrias Research, Edmonton
Lines: 30

A few years back, when I was a student at the University of Alberta, we
had a serious system crash lasting over a day on our AMDAHL 470 V8
(might have been a V6 back then).  One day, after the computer was
taken down for PM, there was no file-system left on the disks (3381's I
believe)...  What happened was that the computing facility had been
expanded without reguard to the capacity of the air conditioning.  The
computer had been left on for some time and in the process, the disks'
internal temperature had far exceeded the specifications.  Everything
worked fine, as long as the disks remained "hot".  When they were
turned off, they contracted sufficiently to scramble the information on
them...  The short term fix was to run with the cabinet doors open
(until adequate air-conditioning was available).

I friend of mine was a system programmer on the above machine.  His
current task was to install a new "paging box" (a device containing
vasts amounts of slow ram and looking like a VERY fast drum to
the AMDAHL).  He had the computer to himself and, to impose a load on
the paging system, he would start up 10 tasks which would proceed to
get 10 megs of memory and loop around touching the first byte of every
page it had.  After finding he a bug, he terminated the tasks and sat
around to figure out a solution.  He noticed that his fix took longer
then the usual 3/10ths of a second to compile (after all he had a V8 to
himself!) so he chased down the active processes to see who was
competing with him.  It seems he had forgotten to kill one of the
paging processes!  The computer had paged in all 10 megs (it was a 16
meg machine) and started to burn CPU like a bat out of hell!  All in
all it had consumed something like a $100,000 in "funny money".

				Gilles
				...!ihnp4!alberta!myrias!ggc