[Info-vax] grey screen of death

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Sunday, 24 May 2015 10:14:29 UTC+1, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply)  wrote:
> In article <mjqlpp$glo$1 at dont-email.me>, David Froble
> <davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes: 
> 
> > > That is what I suspected, but a) the installation tries to figure this 
> > > out itself, b) normally error messages appear when they are not 
> > > sufficient and c) other folks are running fine with the same parameters.
> > 
> > Those parameters are for the system, not a single process.
> 
> Right.  However, I have seen messages at startup complaining about too 
> low system parameters, so I would have expected that this time as well 
> if this were the problem.
> 
> > Are others running HBVS?
> 
> Three nodes in the cluster, essentially identically configured.  Yes, 
> HBVS.
> 
> > Are others running a cluster?
> 
> Yes, all in the same cluster.
> 
> > Are others running "whatever else you're running"?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > Have you compared ALL the SYSGEN parameters from one of your older VMS 
> > versions with the V8.4 SYSGEN parameters?
> 
> Yes.  I did a DIFF of SETPARAMS.DAT for the current version and the last 
> version which worked.  I loaded the old values and it still didn't work.
> I increased those new values which had gone down.  Still didn't work.
> 
> STARTUP_P2 is set tp CDP.
> 
> My newest idea is that there is some problem during the startup
> sequence, which did not exist on 7.3-2, which is preventing the startup
> of the relevant stuff from running. 
> 
> Presumably I could start the stuff by hand by hand once the system is 
> up.  What should this be?
> 
> Comparing the processes on the 8.4 system to those on other nodes, it 
> seems that I am missing the following processes:
> 
>    DECW$TE_%%%%
>    DTLOGIN
>    DTGREET
> 
> How do these get started?
> 
> Could it possibly be a license problem?  (I'm sure I have all the 
> licenses I need, but the appropriate ones might not be loaded before 
> they are needed.)

It's not clear (to me) that you've understood David's question.

You said "other folks are running fine with the same parameters."
But the parameters in question may well be configuration dependent;
comparing them with other folks' setups may not shed much light 
unless the configurations being compared are identical (which seems
unlikely).


re DTLOGIN/DTGREET:
Have you seen 
http://support.hp.com/th-en/document/c03927216
DECW$TE_%%%% are the DECterm processes iirc, which typically won't
exist before a user is logged in, and should be created when the
user creates a DECterm.


re licenses
Licensing problems often end up being logged on a console and/or in
OPERATOR.LOG somewhere. Do you have logging enabled anywhere, have you
checked for any potentially relevant messages in the logfile?


re troubleshooting in general
VMS has loads of tools which the well informed sysadmin can use to
quickly and logically troubleshoot situations like this. But you have
to look, and know (or find out) where to look. If you don't know and
are being helped by outsiders, you need to listen carefully and
respond accordingly, otherwise progress may well be slow.

This is a situation very familiar (from the other end) to people in
support roles (e.g. Customer Support Centre folk) - it seems to be
actually a lot harder for many users than might be expected; ask a
question re X, get an answer to question re Y.

Best of luck.