September 2008

[29-Sep-2008]
Fixing things:   I patched a couple of Alphaservers up-to-date yesterday afternoon, including updating the SRM firmware, which was a tad out of date. On reboot, I was surprised to see a bunch of audit messages appearing when TCP/IP Services attempted to restart. The audit messages were indicating that a number of services were experiencing problems attempting to create log files or read configuration files in their service-specific directories. (144 words, 2 comments, 0 pings)

[16-Sep-2008]
Alignment fault in batch but not in interactive?:   When run interactively, this code behaves itself. No alignment faults as you'd expect. However, if you write a simple one line command procedure to run the resultant image and submit it to batch, the thing generates alignment faults like crazy. Including an executive fault at RMS+001DC540. (Note I'm seeing this via SDA> FLT START TRACE/INDEX=). What gives? (185 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[15-Sep-2008]
Word for the week: Defrag:   One of the novel activities here has been the manual use of BACKUP/RESTORE to defragment disk devices. Considering how it was done, it was rather dangerous. It was pretty easy to justify buying a license for DFO, based on the number of hours that the guys were coming in to defrag disks. (121 words, 2 comments, 0 pings)

[02-Sep-2008]
Sorting out compiles:   I've spent the last day and a half sorting out the compiles for this environment. Obviously, with the port to IA64, the command procedures that are being used to compile and link the in-house application have been modified to compile and link on both Alpha and IA64. Unfortunately, one bit appears to have been missed (rather an important bit, too). (143 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)