- There was a problem with the DNS name servers at CCO that caused us to
lose connections to the outside world for a while on Monday. This did not
affect internal network operations, and CCO fixed the problem after being
notified.
- Located a special SCSI cable for Patrick [the new programmer working for
Phil] so that we could set up his workstation.
- Figured out how to customize the aset security checking tool on unix so
that it would check the integrity of binary files.
- Moved disks around in spring in preparation for doing the Solaris 2.6
upgrade.
- Did the Solaris 2.6 upgrade on Spring.
- Mail was broken on spring after the upgrade. Replacing the sendmail.cf
configuration file with a corrected copy fixed the problem.
- Assisted Kate with rearraging her office, relocating her computers and
their network wiring.
- Bigone and the entire processing cluster crashed after a network fault.
The fault turned out to have been caused by the UDP broadcast program on
Carizo flooding the network with packets, which caused all other network
traffic to stop.
- Assisted with the initial Oracle installation on Spring.
- Worked with Steve to move the remaining paging functions off of Cajon and
onto the LAT server.
- Spring was logging SCSI bus errors. Reseated the disks involved in an
attempt to fix this.
- Called Sun Service about the SCSI errors on Spring. They sent out a pair
of replacement disks.
- Swapped out the disks on Spring, but the errors continued. Placed
another call to Sun. They advised that the external disk box is supposed
to be self-terminating, and that sometimes having an external terminator on
the bus will cause errors. They don't know why. Removing the terminator
from out bus stopped the errors.
- Put a new 4GB disk in Carizo and made it the system disk. This was in
response to the system disk on Carizo running out of file headers, which
caused the system to hang briefly.
- Rebuilt the system disk on Ojai to recover some free space.
- Assisted Nancy Smith from Woodward-Clyde with reading some old 9-track
tapes.
- Planned and coordinated the menu for the USGS Christmas Party.
- Avalon hung when something used up all of its page file space. This may
be related to the change to 32-bit mem files. Malibu also hung on another
day with the same symptoms.
- Started reading the configuration manual for the DECswitch 900EF in
preparation for installing the router software on it. This is to prevent a
repeat of the packet storm that crashed Bigone.
***
- Finished setting up aset security checking on the unix systems.
- Fixed the SCSI bus errors on Spring.
- Moved the last of the paging functions to the LAT server.
- Diagnosed the packet storm problem that crashed the network.
- Several people were heard to remark that this year's USGS Christmas Party
was one of the best ever.