Re: AS/400 Locking up

I've seen this a few times since 1988.  Usually caused by the system
expending almost all it's cycles on communication error recovery - and
that can include twinax devices, not just remote 5x94 controllers and
Ethernet/Tokenring.  Just a week ago a customer on a model 400-2130 was
moving some screens around on his twinax setup.  Somehow (even though
auto-config was on) he ended up with a screen that would not give him a
signon display, although the cursor was at top left (indicating connection
to the controller) - and all of a sudden every other twinax display locked
up, then the remote PC's connected via Ethernet froze and the CPU run
light was on solid.  I've sometimes seen this when moving a screen to a
twinax address where a printer, or a different type of display, is
configured.  It's supposed to delete and recreate the device, but for some
reason sometimes it doesn't and goes into a loop.  Before resorting to a
forced IPL I had him power off all twinax devices on the line, and then at
the screen he had moved I had him try powering off the screen, changing
the twinax address to zero, power on, repeat with addresses 1, 2, 3 etc.
When he got to 4 it came up with a signon display and the system exited
it's tight loop - so I guess that was the device it was trying to recover.

Just one thing that could be the cause - of course your problem may be
totally different !

Maybe you could shame it into working by spray painting the system console
blue and gluing a tombstone to the top.  ;-)


...Neil






Joe Lewis <joelewis@joesystems.com>



        To:     midrange-l@midrange.com
        cc:
        Subject:        AS/400 Locking up


About 30 days ago for the first time, my little 170 just locked up.  TCP
and Twinax stopped working, no error code on the front panel, the power
light was green, and the processor light was lit up solid.   After
talking with IBM (hours later), I had to manual power down.  Once back
up, there were no error listings in any of the logs or in Service Tools.
 Then 2 weeks later, it did it again.  Then over this past weekend,
again yesterday and now this morning.  Hardware support thinks it's
software.  I am on hourly support with Software, and I don't want to
spend the money just find out it's an IBM issue ($250 an hour is not in
my budget).  I upgrade to v5r1 ,with all the PTFs at the time, in
February.  Nothing new has been added since then.  Other then ordering
the latest CUM (which I did), I am stumped.  Has anyone ran into this
before?

- Joe Lewis