Our HP3000 Series 957 froze up around 6 p.m. yesterday (Sunday
evening down-under).  Since it wouldn't respond to a ping from
another node on the network, I raced in to find the computer room
air conditioning unit loudly complaining and registering 90 degrees
Celsius (yes, that's really what it said!), and 90% relative
humidity.

I couldn't believe those figures, but am here to tell you that
every metal surface in the place was **hot**.  Not quite hot
enough to fry an egg, but getting there.  My own super-sensitive
body tells me it was probably only about 45C and humidity well
under 50%.

The console had a stripe of reverse-video OVERTEMPs on it.

I switched on the auxiliary a/c unit (not used for three or more
years) and grabbed a large oscillating fan from another office
and got the temperature down a few degrees within about 20 minutes
or so, and the 957 picked up where it had left off with no damage,
other than the loss of DST offset on the system clock.

Now for the question--can anyone think of a way to interrogate
MPE/iX's sense of temperature?  If it can shut down the OS, then
surely there is some way to ask it how cool (or hot, depending
on your age) it is.  I've looked at SYSDIAG and can't find
anything.  PRED didn't report the overtemp shutdown during its
nightly run at about 3:15 a.m.--why not?  A scan of the system
log file open at the time shows nothing related to the overtemp
condition.

And why did I loose my one-hour DST offset?  I haven't bothered
to set a TZ--does that have anything to do with it?  Despite
travelling around the world 14 times in three different directions,
I'm still pretty fuzzy about computing time differences (I know,
says Mother, got out of bed in Missouri at 4 a.m.).

So ... how can I get my system to tell me what its operating
temperature is?  (I have a rectal thermometre, if that's of any
use.)

Ron Burnett
Royal Children's Hospital
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