University of California at Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Instructional Systems Support Group /usr/pub/reports/manager/Fall_1994 Report on EECS Instructional Computing Facilities ------------------------------------------------- Fall Semester 1994 by: Kevin Mullally, Manager of EECS Instructional Systems Soda Hall: In August 1994, the new CS Division building was opened. EECS Instruction has been assigned rooms 271, 273, 275, 311 ,349 and 311 Soda for Insructional workstations. Here are the plans for these labs: 271 Soda 33 HP 712s; primarily for CS61B 273 Soda 33 HP 712s; primarily for CS61C 275 Soda 33 HP 712s; primarily for CS61A 347 and 349 Soda 20 HP 720s; for other CS users 311 Soda 9 HP720s (the Snake cluster); for CS grads At the start of the Fall semester, only 33 HP712s had been received. These were installed in 271 and 273 Soda, and the CS61B and CS61C classes started using these labs. Those classes had previously used the WEB in Evans Hall. The remaining workstations and 2 large fileservers are expected to arrive in September and October. In the meantime, all CS classes other than CS61B and CS61C are expected to use the Cory Hall labs as they have done in past semesters. CS61A reserves room 105 Cory at times. Cory Hall: These are the Cory Hall labs for Instructional computers: 199 Cory 16 Irises, 8 HP 715s 105 Cory 30 HP 715s 111 and 119 Cory 28 DEC 2100 and 5000/25 wkstns Construction work in room 199 was started in July and has continued beyond the completion date of August 15. It should be completed in mid September. Until then, 11 Irises are jammed into room 127 Cory, and 5 others are in storage. Room 117 Cory was changed over the summer from an Iris lab to the new headquarters of the4 XCF student group (they were displaced from room 199 Cory). After room 199 is completed, the Irises will be moved from 127 Cory and 127 Cory will be converted into an elecronics lab for EE classses. September The Instructional mail server, "pasteur.eecs.berkeley.edu", hung up 3 or 4 times during the first 2 weeks of September. The symptoms seen by the users included the apparent disappearance of mail spools, delayed email diliveries and slow logins on the HPs (which look for new mail). This seems to have been caused by a combination of a kernel with an insufficient "mbuf" array size and a kernel bug that caused the mail server to freeze as a result. We have installed a patch and raised the "mbuf" size to the maximun. The problem has not reoccurred. The 138 net in Cory Hall crashed 2 times on Sept 9 and once again on Sept 11. Each day, the Irises and HPs in 127 Cory and 105 Cory were unusable for 3-4 hours. The problem was traced to new network hardware that had recently been installed for room 199 Cory. The hardware was replaced and the problem has not reoccurred. November Po.eecs was down from about 9:15am until 4pm on Wed Nov 16. This was caused by a hardware failure in memory; the bad memory was diagnosed and removed. Po.eecs was down from about 4pm-6pm on Fri Nov 18 for the installation of replacement memory. Po.eecs was down from about 11:30am until 6:30pm on Sat Nov 26. This crash was apparently caused by either an overload of the network driver (caused by heavy NFS traffic) or a filling of the system process table (CS186 and other programming classes have been creating a lot of runaway processes lately). We will install a new kernel soon, with a patch for the network driver and an increase in the maximum number of proceses. Po.eecs is a central file server, so its absence meant that accounts for CS162, CS164, CS61A and about 1/3 of all our named accounts were inaccessible. Also, the /home/tmp directory was unavailable. /home/tmp is spill-over disk space for any user that needs it.