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Subject: Re: SunHardware/1702: No fans after today!
To: obrien@aerospace.aero.org
Date: Fri, 1 Apr 1994 15:17:02 -0800 (PST)
From: "Michael Elkins" <elkins@aerospace.aero.org>
Cc: gnats-fixer@aerospace.aero.org
In-Reply-To: <9404012125.AA25173@antares.aero.org> from "obrien@aerospace.aero.org" at Apr 1, 94 01:25:03 pm
Organization: Computer Systems Research Department, The Aerospace Corporation
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obrien@aerospace.aero.org writes:
> 	I just noticed on Usenet that there is a bit of a problem with
> 	the fans on SparcStations.  Apparently they're under the control of
> 	the CPU microcode, for some reason that escapes me.  Anyway, there's
> 	a problem involving the Time-of-Year clock on the motherboards, which
> 	all share common (Forth-language!) microcode, so that on all Sparc-
> 	stations, at 16:00 PST today, which is midnight GMT, all of the fans
> 	in all of the Sparcstations in existence will stop, and all of the
> 	machines will cook.
> 	
> 	I dunno what we do about this - maybe just look at the calendar
> 	and wait.

Most people on the net agree that the way to defeat this rather odd behavior
is to set up a batch job to forward past 4pm, sleep for several minutes,
and then resync the time through our ntp server.  On solarium:

(solarium#46) at 1555 /usr/tmp/timefix
job 3963 at Fri Apr  1 15:55:00 1994
(solarium#47) cat /usr/tmp/timefix
#!/bin/csh -f
rsh antares date 9404011605
pexec `listall sun` \; rsh %h rdate antares
sleep 600
#antares will have synced at this point
pexec `listall sun` \; rsh %h rdate antares

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