Diagnosing a PM-2e crash

Brian Tao (taob@io.org)
Sat, 28 Oct 1995 19:30:41 -0400 (EDT)

What sort of tools are available to figure out what caused a PM-2e
to crash? We've had three of our Portmasters suddenly stop responding
to pings over Ethernet and to incoming calls in the past week. In
some (but not all) cases, the activity LED on the PM-2e has gone out
(we are using the BNC connectors on all eleven PM-2e's). Power
cycling the unit always brings it back to life.

I don't want to get into the advantages and disadvantages of thin
vs. thick vs. twisted-pair, but would plugging the PM-2e's into a UTP
hub help? Are there any on-board diagnostics to help me trace what
caused the lockup? We are running ComOS 3.1.4 with BSD/OS 2.0
machines as login hosts.

One (rather embarrassing) point: the collision rate on our
network is currently sitting at above 50% and spikes above 100%...
could this cause a Portmaster to hang?

--
Brian Tao (BT300, taob@io.org)
Systems Administrator, Internex Online Inc.
"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"