[Info-vax] grey screen of death

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <dd612113-881a-4b95-b44a-93c2b186a173 at googlegroups.com>,
johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk writes: 

> 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).

Comparable systems.  I also doubt that a problem with the system 
parameters, quotas, etc would affect ONLY DECwindows.  Since I have no 
other problems, I doubt that there is a basic misconfiguration problem, 
but rather something specific to DECwindows.

> 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.

OK.

> 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?

Yes, and yes.

> 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.

The process DECW$SERVER_0 looks suspicious.  On other systems, where
things work, it basically just sits there.  Here, it is looping (but not
such that it consumes a lot of CPU).  After a few minutes, it stops
looping.  One can see in accounting that processes get the
SYSTEM-F-IMGDMP which I mentioned before, but I can't find any 
information on this related to DECwindows.

I didn't see anything suspicious in SHOW PROC/ACC or SHOW PROC/QUOT, but 
then I might not be looking for the right things.

I guess what I need to figure out is to see what this process is doing, 
what causes it to loop, etc.

Again, I do see the hourglass on the back background, so it is not a 
problem with the very basic setup.  The problem is definitely related to 
the looping processes.  Unfortunately, I don't see any error messages in 
any log files.