RE: Freezing AS400

Tim:

Three elements make this especially difficult...

1. You are "quite behind on PTF's".
2. It's happened only twice in a year. I'd guess the second was recent and it 
prompted you to post this, so the first time would maybe be 6-8 or more months 
ago.
3. You can't sign on to the console when it happens.

Okay, item 1 really has to be taken care of before even attempting to figure 
anything out. It's effectively impossible to make guesses without being 
reasonably current on PTFs. And for V4R4, this can even mean being a year 
behind the most recent.

Item 2 means it's difficult to prepare for. You could run Performance Tools or 
whatever, but it might be another year or two (or forever) before it happens 
again. Of course, it could also be tomorrow.

Item 3... The first obvious step is to make certain nobody can change job run 
priority to interfere with the console. But like others, I suspect this isn't 
your problem anyway.

But more info is needed before making guesses beyond this. For example, how are 
your memory pools set up? And are you running QCTL or QBASE? (Doesn't 
necessarily make a difference, but can suggest further questions.) Was the 
timing of the two problems important? I.e., did it happen say just before 
end-of-quarter when large ad hoc queries might've been run? So many possible, 
especially in light of item 1 above, one question is as meaningful as another.

Good luck, because it'll take luck to find THE answer.

Tom Liotta

On Tue, 17 July 2001, Tim Shepherd wrote:

> 
> We are quite behind on PTF's.
> The processor activity light shoots right across to 100% and there is now
> way of signing on to the system (Steven Donnellan suggested WRKSYSACT, but
> no way is the machine allowing us to sign on). The processor check light
> does not come on. We aren't running lots of comms jobs, just TCP/IP for
> telnet and a couple of printers and basic email. No Java at all. Disk
> utilisation is at 74%...and we're on a UPS.
> My only feeling is that there is a job filling the disk or a program
> looping, but no way of telling. We tried using the "hog hunter" function,
> but the instructions and real life didn't coincide too well, and we were
> unable to find out what job was causing the problem or take a system dump.
> 

(snip)

> > >
> > > We have had two of the same problems in the last year. The machine CPU
> > > utilisation hits 100%, we can't sign on to the console, and no other
> > > efforts, like using the front panel, have any effect. Eventually we have
> > had
> > > to turn off the machine and power back up. The logs do not show anything
> > > abnormal once we get the machine back.
> > >
> > > We have a model 500 with 512 Mb memory and are on V4R4. Any ideas???

-- 
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone  253-872-7788
Fax  253-872-7904
http://www.400Security.com


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