We had something unusual happen both yesterday and
today:  Short duration power failures on both days, and in
both cases our Series 957 was NOT successful in
completing the power fail recovery cycle.  All attempts at
TC and/or RS were no-go;  in both cases we had to resort
to turning off the power switch on the SPU cabinet.
In the last month or so we have had a couple other cases
where power fail recovery on our 957 was unsuccessful,
but not to the extent that cycling SPU power was required.
Note we have been on X.50.24 for about seven weeks.
 
Here is a little more detail:
 
Monday 6 Feb @ ~ 17:30:  Relatively "clean" power
outage lasting about 20 seconds.  957 hung in power
fail recovery sequence.  Two attempts at   CM> TC   and
one attempt at   CM> RS   all result in:
 
 ------- <bunch of stuff omitted>
Booting...
ENTRY_TEST status = 0
Failed to initialize
ENTRY_INIT status = -4
 ------- followed by four screen lines of HEX numbers, and
an "offer" from MPE/iX to try again;  i.e:
"Boot from primary boot path  (Y  or  N) ?>
 
Figured failing to boot three times in a row is enough, and
I decline to take the machine up on the offer to try again.
Instead we hit the power switch and cycle power to the SPU,
recalling that turning off the power is different than having a
power failure with the power switch left "ON".  IT WORKS
(whew....).
 
Tuesday 7 Feb @ ~ 13:30:  Another relatively clean power
outage, lasting about 15 seconds.  957 again hung in power
fail recovery sequence.  Leaving out a bunch of stumbling
around:  MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET came up with
one out of six SCSI discs missing;  said "not available" in
SYSTEM I/O AT BOOT TIME list.  The disc the system can
not see is LDEV 3, an older 1.3 GByte disc in SPU cabinet.
Again, all combinations of CM> TC   and CM> RS   fail to
clear the problem.  Now we are starting to wonder if we lost
a disc.  BUT:  Resort one more time to cycling power switch,
and one more time IT WORKS:  LDEV 3 comes back to life...
Another sigh of relief.....  But this is getting a little tiresome....
 
Our CE is coming out to do some more power fail & etc.
testing, which hopefully will lead to identification of a problem
that can be fixed, that will give us back the reliability to which
we have become accustomed on power fail recovery.   In the
meantime, anyone else having problems in this area  ????
 
===========================================
Ken Sletten                                    Tel:  360-396-2525
NUWC Division Keyport             Fax: 360-396-5183
Code 3311, Building 894
Keyport, WA  98345
[log in to unmask]
===========================================