[rescue] Catatonia in the SGI Indigo2

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Now here's one ... cybernetic catatonia, SGI style.

I've got an SGI Indigo2: R4.4k/200, IP22, 128 MB, Extreme Graphics.  Nothing
special about it except for the 3com EISA 100baseT card I added last
November. Peripherals are stock internal CD-ROM, 2 internal 4.5 gig drives,
and, on the external SCSI chain, a fast CD-ROM reader and an 8x CD-ROM
burner.

The machine has worked fine for months.  Always has, in fact.  The 100baseT
card's no speed demon, but the whole thing has run just fine since I got it
last summer.

In the last couple of days, though, it has died when under moderate loads.
When I say "died," I mean the screen goes blank, the yellow "no signal"
light on the monitor comes on, and the pilot light on the I^2 itself changes
from green to amber.  The machine's completely catatonic, with no response
to physical (mouse, keyboard) or neurological (pings) stimuli.

It hasn't done this while running Distributed Folding hour after hour, but
it did it several times while accepting SMB file transfers and FTP file
transfers.  I've tried both ec0 (built-in 10baseT) and fe0 (3c597 100baseT),
and it dies either way.  Just now, it crapped out while I was watching it
burn a CD from some WAV files on the internal drive.  All those activities
are common things for this machine to do, and it used to do them
faultlessly.  I see nothing in the usual logs, but I'll look at anything if
someone will ship me a clue about new places to look.

At the moment, I'm runing the built-in system diagnostics, but I haven't
seen any exception messages after about 50 minutes....

I seek anatomically possible suggestions as to my next course of action.

Thanks.

-Shel
--
Sheldon T. Hall
shel at cmhc.com
206-780-7971 (CMHC)
206-842-2858 (Home)