[luau] Mililani's Sun server - (new) problems

[Warren Togami]

The following is my message to the Department of Education's Cliff Goto. 
    On Tuesday Rick Chavez and I spent another 8 hours at Mililani 
dealing with these new problems.

Any ideas?


=====================

Hi Cliff,

Over the weekend Mililani had power glitches, after which the Sun server 
would no longer boot.

* Some student turned the key into diagnostic mode, which tried to boot 
from the network rather than disk.  For now we changed it back to '1' 
and put the key into the Sun drawer.

Several questions for you:
* (Not Urgent) Some software that we were trying to get working causes X 
to crash in Solaris 9 u2.  Someone within Sun confirmed this and said it 
may be solved by this patch, but it is not available from Free SunSolve. 
  Could you possibly grab it for me?
Patch-ID# 113098-01
Synopsis: X11 6.6.1: X RENDER extension patch
BugId's fixed with this patch: 4684184
Changes incorporated in this version: 4684184
Date: Jan/09/03

* Filesystem had hundreds of errors/corruptions.  We suspect some of 
this was due to several unclean poweroffs and crashes, but a few times 
we would cleanly reboot and fsck found even more errors.  Is this a sign 
of possible hardware failure?

* hme0 interface stopped working for seemlingly no reason.  We tried for 
5 hours straight until 9pm testing different settings with no success. 
hme0 is the interface going to the school network/Internet.  hme1 and 
hme2 both are working fine, serving two internal subnets of Sun Rays.

I plugged the hme0 cable into my laptop, it worked fine with DHCP.  I 
changed my laptop IP address to the exact IP/netmask/gateway of hme0, it 
worked.  I changed my MAC address to match the Sun interface too, it 
still worked.  Because of this I do not believe it is a router issue, 
hme0 is either somehow misconfigured or died completely.

For now the lab is back up and running with Solaris 9 u2, StarOffice 6.0 
and one printer plugged into the parallel port.  They can survive for 
now without Internet until we get the hme0 problem fixed.

hme0 is the onboard interface so probably can't be replaced easily.  Do 
you have any extra hme interfaces that we can add to the Sun E450?  (If 
possible two extra?)

I'm hoping this is just some configuration issue that we're missing, but 
we tried for hours and couldn't get hme0 to work.  Could not even ping 
the gateway.  Strangely 5 out of several thousand ping packets would 
return, and the arp table sometimes showed the gateway and another host 
on the hme0 interface, but nothing beyond this.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com