The return of la bomba

[John Coolidge]

My machine has been mysteriously producing the dreaded bomb box
every since switching over to the real 2.0 release. This happens
most often while running Login (only once anywhere else, and that
may be unrelated). It's consistently producing ID=07. The first
time I saw it was when setting session type the first time I booted
after installation (_NO_ customization done, absolutely vanilla
system). Since then, it's popped up at irregular times while I'm
using Login, most often when setting session type.

However, there's more! I've got process accounting turned on (lots
of neat numbers to try and make sense of :-)), and this had made
the crashing a bit more regular. My machine started dying at 4am,
not coincidentally the time one of the acct processes runs from
cron. This was, again, the ID=07 bomb box. Yesterday I reinstalled
the MacsBug from the beta release, and this morning the machine was
properly bombed again, but with different symptoms. A dialog box
telling me that process accounting was on (with a 4am timestamp)
was up, but everything was hung.

Looking at the sar logs, the machine shows a consistent profile
over the night: it's completely idle 0-3am, about 60% user,
40% system over 4am, then about 10% user 90% system from 5am on.
This leads me to suspect that the dialog box (either the real one
or the bomba) is busy-waiting for me to click on it.

Anybody have any clues as to what's causing the bombs? My first
guess is that something is wrong with dialogs and Login, but they
do work most of the time (just not all the time). Cron/acct's
always seems to kill it, though (I'm not sure I want it putting
up a dialog, for that matter --- I'm not going to answer it for
hours anyway). Obligatory hardware info: Mac II/PMMU, 8M.

Thanks,
--John

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John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge at cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1990 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.
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