wierd 386 error

[Rick Kelly]

In article <1991Mar14.085304.4906 at grian.cps.altadena.ca.us> alex at grian.cps.altadena.ca.us (Alex Pournelle) writes:
>I ran into a really really wierd one today--thought I'd share it with
>you.
>
>System that previously worked fine, suddenly stopped --when booted up,
>it wouldn't get past cron startup.  Just crashes.
>
>Looked at it for a while -- suddenly realized that the customer had
>taken the printer away, but left the parallel printer cable connected.
>Removed it, rebooted, and it's fine.  What could have been a panicky
>multi-hour problem turned out to be ten minutes' luck.  Damfino how a
>simple cable could cause cron to hang, though.
>
>ANY idea?  Cable seems fine, on MS-DOS systems.  You'll understand I'm
>not too interested in trying it on the XENIX system!


That unterminated parallel cable probably makes a fine antenna.  The system is
broadcasting it's own noise back to the cpu.  Probably causes some wierd
spurious interrupt that XENIX doesn't like.  Serial cables can do the same
thing.


Rick Kelly	rmk at rmkhome.UUCP	frog!rmkhome!rmk	rmk at frog.UUCP