[Info-vax] delay in startup

[John Wallace]

On Mar 26, 6:21 am, hel... at astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---
undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <4f6f763f$0$1653$c3e8da3$f017e... at news.astraweb.com>, JF
>
> Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> writes:
> > Ok, so the mention of battery was misleading. You're just talking ahout
> > the toy clock, not some system that can remain powered on (or memory
> > kept alive) via batteries.
>
> Right.
>
> > Of one has a bad TOY battery, then the VMS system may have been asking
> > for time before proceeding with the boot. And it may have taken you that
> > long to enter the time. (or perhpaps the propt for time times out after
> > a couple hours and VMS boots anyways)
>
> No-one entered any time (except for the THIRD system, not mentioned in
> the post, which as expected didn't boot because it forgot it was
> supposed to boot VMS because the battery was dead, and for the same
> reason the time had to be entered); the system booted by itself.
> According to the documentation, the value of 65535 µfortnights causes
> the prompt to repeat indefinitely:
>
> Parameter Name            Current    Default    Minimum    Maximum Unit  Dynamic
> --------------            -------    -------    -------    ------- ----  -------
> TIMEPROMPTWAIT              65535         -1          0         -1 uFortnights
>
>        o  If TIMEPROMPTWAIT is a number in the range of 32768 through
>           65535, the prompt for the time is issued at intervals starting
>           with 2 and doubling until 256 seconds is reached. If no
>           response is received, the prompts restart, with the 2-second
>           interval. This prompting process repeats indefinitely, until
>           you specify a time.
>
> > Is it possible that you have a bad system disk on one node and it took
> > that long to perform the equivalent of mount/verify of the system disk ?
>
> Maybe.  Any way to easily test this?

Would it be safe to assume that you've disabled the operator logs on
these systems? If you hadn't, they might have provided some clues as
to what went on when.