We are having major communication problems with 2 of our spectrometers.
This problem occurs on both our Inova500 and Inova300 running under
vnmr6.1b and solaris2.7 on ultra5 workstations.
Both seem to lose communication with the console. 'Su acqproc' and
resetting the console appears to restore communication temporarily. But
as soon as you type 'su', several errors may occur:
1. 'Su cannot proceed; abort of ACQI not complete'
2. 'Su cannot proceed; console is powered down or not connected'
3. And in the shell window:
'channel # on the console is already connected to another process'
which repeats over and over. Or sometimes:
'No heartbeat reply; console is powered down or not connected' or
'msgehandler.c line490: chkExpQ: Console connection not established
yet.'
4. Sometimes an experiment will queue if you do additional 'su' commands.
5. If you try to abort an acquisition or "ga", you get the error:
'No abort acq [or ga] when system is in interactive mode.'
6. Always, buttons in the Acqi window (lock, insert, eject) disappear
because the spectrometer thinks you are doing something.
7. Sometimes there is no lock signal in the lock window (ie, the yellow
line is missing)
Sometimes aborting the acquisition will restore communication.
Sometimes just typing su again will restore it. But never for very
long.
What we've done:
--We've shutdown the console and rebooted the computer several times.
Sometimes it will come back, but only for about half an hour.
--We hooked up another computer (an Ultra 10) and installed vnmr6.1b
fresh, but saw the same problems.
--All fans are running.
--Voltages across the power supply are close--there is one that is 11
instead of 10. Checking the power supply with an oscilloscope looks ok.
We were originally running at a voltage of 204 when the problem first
occurred, but we have since installed a transformer to boost the voltage
to 218 and the problem persists.
--The problem can be avoided on the Inova500 if we run 6.1a instead of
6.1b, still on the Ultra5. We occasionally get hangups, but one or two
sequences of 'su acqproc' will fix it.
--The problem can be avoided almost completely on the Inova300 if we run
6.1a on a sparcstation 5 (instead of the Ultra5).
--Varian Tech Support suggested the following, which we have also done.
This allows us to run under vnmr6.1b again for a few days at a time before
the problem occurs again.
Open a terminal window and do the following
1. First make sure that you do not have more that one
Expproc running when this happens. You can check this
by typing on a terminal window the following
ps -fea
2.Then be sure that Expproc and associated processes
are not active. (This includes acqstat and acqi
windows)
3.Log in as vnmr1 and type the following:
vnmr1> cd /vnmr/bin
vnmr1> ls -al
check the permission of the following files:
-rwsr-sr-x 1 vnmr1 nmr 1575260 Dec 18 1996 Vnmr
-rwsr-sr-x 1 vnmr1 nmr 7916 Dec 18 1996 send2Vnmr
-rwsr-sr-x 1 vnmr1 nmr 113896 Dec 18 1996 Expproc
If they do not have the UID and GID bit set, do the
following correction:
vnmr1> chmod 6755 Vnmr
vnmr1> chmod 6755 send2Vnmr
vnmr1> cd ../acqbin
vnmr1> chmod 6755 Expproc
4.Log in as root and type the following:
# cd /vnmr/bin
# ./rmipcs a
Answer y to the question.
5.Reboot the spectrometer console and restart Expproc:
su acqproc
Does anyone have any other ideas that we can try?? Any help would be
appreciated.
----------------
Letitia Yao
Dept. of Chemistry
University of Minnesota
letitia_at_nmr.chem.umn.edu
Received on Thu Jun 01 2000 - 12:18:00 MST