Riddles: Crash? Power failure?
All of a sudden, at about 10:00 this morning, Diana seemed gone. I was warned by the fact that all of the webs – including webmail – appeared unreachable, and by a phone call by my daughter that there was no Internet access from any PC. Instructing her by phone, I learned the console was on the console prompt, with a message that DKB0 (the boot device) could not be found.
Some way, the system tried to recover from an error but couldn’t reach the boot device….
I had my daughter restart the HSZ50 controller and boot Diana – which worked fine from there.
Except for this blog and the VMS forum. The others worked just fine.
When I got home, I found the cause of the failures of the blog and the forum were what I expected: the logicals weren’t defined properly, so I corrected the startup procedure and defined the logicals by hand. That solved that issue.
What caused the breakdown could not be found. OPERATOR.LOG didn’t mention anything, not did Diagnose – no appearant errors in ERRLOG.SYS. There was no system dump either, and today’s CLUE CRASH logging showed a dump of a long time ago.
I had been thinking of a power failure, but is seems none had occurred: all electrical clocks (that would normally blink) were showing the right time…. So what cuased it will remain a mistery.
Forum issues
One of the tests I did after re-enabling the forums, was creating a new member, hoping to get an email to notify the registration. The message came in when I used the company e-mail address, using the numbered personal domain – a relic of years past – failed – but that is an issue with VMS’s SMTP engine. That I didn’t see these messages is caused by the fact that the company’s SPAM filter filters them as spam. I have to ask the system manager to take action on that….
It’s weird that the system did return “invalid name : ;” causing a non-CGI conform request message, breaking the session – have to dig into that.
The new software does not block additions. It just prevents them to show up if a non-admin user checks the memberlist – by that, their spam misses target. Yet, I would like to have these bogus additions be blocked, the question remains: how to achive that? It would be nice if new registrations were stored in a separate table, a mail to be sent to the supplied e-mail address with a link for confirmation. If that is received within, say: 1 week, their registration can be ectivated and only than a web address can be added.
It has some advantages, but the problem persists.
What I expected to be there but is missing: a way to delete members directly from the memberlist. Well, there is a script that removes all inactive users from the database, to be run on regular intervals. So I’ll get that.
However, there is a major PHP problem with the forum:
%HTTPD-W-NOTICED, 20-NOV-2007 19:02:46, CGI:1969, not a strict CGI response
-NOTICED-I-SERVICE, http://www.grootersnet.nl:80
-NOTICED-I-CLIENT, 192.168.0.33
-NOTICED-I-URI, GET (62 bytes) /vmsforum/admin/index.php?sid=<HEX session ID>
-NOTICED-I-SCRIPT, /vmsforum/admin/index.php vmsforum:[admin]index.php (cgi_exe:phpwasd.exe) VMSFORUM:[admin]index.php
-NOTICED-I-CGI, <HEX session code> (129 bytes) %SYSTEM-F-HPARITH, high performance arithmetic trap, Imask=00000000, Fmask=00000002, summary=02, PC=00000000001E9C94, PS=0000001B
-NOTICED-I-RXTX, err:0/0 raw:876/0 net:876/0
I had this before, but this happens since I’m logged in as forum administrator, and want to logout – or have the admin panel show up.
Nasty.