Deep Dish: The cost of running prototypes...

I wanted to run logresolve a program to resolve IP addresses in Apache's logs, so Chuck and I headed to the server room and hooked a monitor and keyboard up to Deep Dish. When we turned it on, scrolling down the screen was the error "DST cache overflow". Nobody knew what this was, so we decided to reboot. Unfortunately, Deep Dish declined to cooperate and we ended up stuck in open firmware. Deep Dish is configured to boot off the floppy disk, loading the kernel into RAM. All other files are stored on the hard drive, but Deep Dish wouldn't load the kernel off floppy. Chuck reinitialized the boot floppy and reloaded the kernel, but to no avail. We pulled the battery and left the system sit overnight.

The next morning we came in and it booted right up, but we had the wrong kernel version on the disk, so we turned it back off again while we found the correct one. We placed the correct kernel on the disk, tried it again, and the same boot we encountered yesterday recurred. We took the battery out and let the machine sit for an hour. Chuck did some reading on YDL and the ANS and then we came back to it. We powered up the machine,, Chuck typed a few lines into open firmware, and finally...

Applefritter's been up since July 15, 1999 and that was our first downtime (June, 2000). Not too bad for a prototype.

Update: Applefritter finally stopped using Deep Dish when the SCSI controller blew. The server still boots, but cannot access anything on SCSI. Unfortunately, the system was not under warranty.