5 May
2013
5 May
'13
4:55 a.m.
On May 5, 2013, at 6:14 AM, Peter Coghlan <cctech at beyondthepale.ie> wrote:
Do either of:
$ REPLY /ENABLE
$ SHOW ERROR
show up any problems? You might need:
$ SET TERMINAL /BROADCAST
and/or
$ SET BROADCAST=ALL
with REPLY /ENABLE if you are doing this on the console and something has
disabled broadcasts on the console.
Any of these would probably be great, but I should probably be a little
more clear; it's not really responding at all to input after I respond
to a prompt. After the carriage return, it just sits there and doesn't
even echo anything, though as I mentioned, anything running elsewhere
(like MONITOR) still seems to keep going.
In older versions of VMS,
$ ANALYZE /ERROR
used to be very useful for spotting behind-the-scenes hardware problems and
worked straight out of the box but it was replaced in later versions (on Alpha
at least - I'm not sure about VAX) by
$ DIAGNOSE /TRANSLATE
which required extra software to be installed and possibly licensed first.
I lost track of what happened after that but I think that was replaced
again by something else equally difficult to make use of :-(
I'll check on that, though with the above caveat.
Your disk could be going to sleep but it seems
unlikely that it would
recover by just halting and rebooting the system.
Well, it's not impossible... it's a CMD CQD-220 SCSI card, and under
some circumstances (possibly including booting), it issues a bus reset
which generally puts things in a consistent state.
With VAX/VMS, having lots of physical memory is
neither necessary nor
sufficient. More important is how the virtual memory system is configured.
Perhaps you are low on pagefile space or non-paged pool or something like
that?
That is altogether likely. I'm still working to understand the concept
of pool, since I haven't gotten that far in the RSX-11M or VMS manuals
yet.
Use
$ SHOW MEMORY /FILES
to check how much free pagefile space you have.
$ SHOW MEMORY /POOL /FULL
will give a vast number of figures. If "Free space" is low and "Current
size"
is much bigger than "Initial size" and approaching "Maximum size",
you may be
running into problems with non-paged pool.
The free space numbers seem fine and always have, but I haven't run
it while doing something like an install. I'll have to try that.
The pool space numbers don't seem terribly large, but I'm not quite
sure what nominal ones are.
If there are no hardware problems, an AUTOGEN might
well help. For best
results, it should be done after whatever activity that might have used up
resources but it's obviously no good if the machine stops responding in the
middle of the AUTOGEN procedure. Tell AUTOGEN to save feedback and use it
when calculating new system parameters. It will complain that the machine
wasn't up for 24 hours but tell it to do it anyway.
I was considering that. I'll give it a shot.
Thanks!
- Dave