Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!lll-winken!ubvax!ames!killer!loci
From: loci@killer.UUCP (loci!clb)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general
Subject: Re: More silly 3b1 quesitons. :-)
Summary: PANICS are just that
Message-ID: <3994@killer.UUCP>
Date: 5 May 88 19:34:56 GMT
References: <431@jonlab.UUCP> <28@booboo.UUCP>
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 34
From:	clb@loci.uucp (CLBrunow)

In article <28@booboo.UUCP>, spear@booboo.UUCP (Steve Spearman) writes:
>                           .... but some people experienced system
> panics that were believed to be related.  You can certainly try the
> program, but if you see unexplained panics you didn't have before,
> you might want to discontinue use.
> 

	I don't believe that PANICS are any more rational in the
	7300 than in people, but rather a loss of good sense.

	Panic traps have an amusing variety of messages and once
	my machine did something really bizzare: suddenly the top
	line (with the date, etc.) went sliding to the bottom of
	the screen, being followed by what looked like bars (vertical)
	so that the effect was like a post office or bank teller
	window slamming shut. I practically fell out of my chair, but
	rebooting made everything alright again. In fact, rebooting
	has always brought me back.

	I have a ritual that I have to go through about twice a year
	when the panics start happening frequently: I reformat the
	hard disk and reload the system and that helps a lot. My
	explanation is that the file system gets fragmented and the
	disk starts making seek errors as it jumps all over the place
	to read files (this is only my theory).

	Some years ago, I worked at Mostek where we tried to explain
	soft errors in RAM chips. The explanation for many of them
	was hits by ionizing radiation (cosmic rays) which can't be
	predicted or shielded, and that led to much discussion about
	large memories arrays (mega-bytes) and how the probability
	would increased for errors to the point that on-board error
	correction would be neccessary.

	Bottom Line: DON'T PANIC (you've heard that before, haven't you)