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What is this? -- ArcaOS 5.02 kidding me? - What is PlayTime?

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Sean Casey:
All the posts provide good information.  A hardware fault would be my first guess.

I suspect many are running OS/2 on older machines.  It could be something as simple as needing to reapply thermal compound on the CPU, which has a limited life of about 4 years (or less).  I proactively change my power supplies at about 5 years.  You might consider reading the SMART data from your storage device to identify any errors, run memtest overnight to test your RAM, and run MPrime's torture test (Option #15) to see if you can generate any errors.  Turn off all unused mobo features in your BIOS. I normally would recommend to make sure you're current on available device drivers, but this is OS/2 :-) 

Sean Casey:

--- Quote from: Mathias on January 09, 2019, 10:39:30 pm ---DaveI am sure though, the machine is, hardware-wise, fine.
--- End quote ---

I took too long to post and didn't see your updated post.  If a software issue, hopefully it was a fluke and the last time you see it. 

If you're not using JFS, you might consider changing over to it.  JFS is extremely robust having been used on midrange AIX systems for many years and is great at recovering from unclean reboots/remounts.

Doug Bissett:

--- Quote ---Interesting though, why does the attribute dialog says ¨PlayTime¨ with a smily (see upmost (first) post)...
--- End quote ---

It is not impossible, that some virus activity modified something that caused that. It was probably not in OS/2, but even that isn't impossible. If you see that every time, it may be interesting to use DFSEE to capture it, and see if JvW can tell what happened. You would need a subscription to DFSEE.

Mathias:
Sean, this is indeed quite an old machine, Athlon X2.. I suppose atleast 10 years old. It's one of the software test PCs at home. And indeed, the compound hasn't been changed for atleast 2 years, but the overheat sensor did not indicate. I'll have a look into BIOS (yes, good old BIOS, no EFI yet) to check out temperatures.

PSU.. good question. This is still the first power supply in that machine, so it's ~10 years old, nicely maintained though. It's got a new fan (1 year old) and it's clean inside. - And ontop it does not need to deliver that much power. With ArcaOS (or OS/2) It's an office machine that requires ~80 Watts at max.
I'm sure after all this time, it will not deliver the full 500 Watts peak power anymore, but should be plenty to run an office machine. ; )

I highly doubt it's the PSU, but I can check this out too: BIOS shows the lanes and which voltage is on what.

SMART data actually looking brilliant. As part of software testing for ArcaOS, I've tried the latest smartmontools, showing that the hard drive is very young and has no issues, temperature is fine also.


Sean> Run MPrime's torture test (Option #15) to see if you can generate any errors.

Uff, that is hard to do, as this test machine only has ArcaOS 5.02EN. I cannot dualboot to anything that can run "the usual stuff", besides memtest..

=---> I will check the hardware today, including memtest, after returning home, to exclude the hardware from the list of culprits.. ; )


Sean> If you're not using JFS, you might consider changing over to it.  JFS is extremely robust having been used on midrange AIX systems for many years and is great at recovering from unclean reboots/remounts.

Nope, running JFS on all ArcaOS installations. My Warp 3 though has HPFS.

____________________________________________


DougB> It is not impossible, that some virus activity modified something that caused that. It was probably not in OS/2, but even that isn't impossible.

Let me think, on this machine I've done the following things last time:
01) tried out smartmontools 7.0 beta from the ArcaNoae subscription repository
02) booted Gentoo Linux from a stick, mounted the ArcaOS-root partition "drive C:", CD'ed into /mnt/aos/install, ran "lspci > hwlist.txt", CD'ed back to /, entered "umount /mnt/aos", entered "init 6" (rebooted), removed the stick when the machine was showing POST again --> booted from C: "ArcaOS" as usual
03) continued work as normal, opened firefox to report my test results to Lewis, sent him the hwlist.txt from C:\Install, deleted C:\install\hwlist.txt via ArcaOS GUI
04) doing some translations (still everything normal, all files and directories displayed)
05) shut down the ArcaOS machine in the usual way, no exceptions, nothing unusual
06) next day turned on, some reading in the forums, translations going on, nothing unusual
07) like 6
08) yesterday turned on.. nothing special on boot or the GUI
09) opened up firefox 45.x (experimental release) to read forum entries, look around on amazon
10) opened thunderbird (current stable release) to read and answer mails
11) finished all the above and wanted to access C:\Entwicklung (Development folder for translations and to compile stuff), but it was not displayed in the ArcaOS GUI anymore, alongside some other directories that usually were there..
12) checked some other views, just to find out, the files and directories were missing there also
13) checked the OS/2 prompt --> everything is there, as usual! --> phew... ; )
14) checked the output of "ls -la C:\" to see if I might be missing the access rights to read the directories, but naw.. everything on 777 (oh yeah xD)
15) opened up properties of "Drive C:" to check the "include" tab, just to find this werid "Playtime" output, and a graphical smily, where usually the attributes would be. --> VERY odd
16) machine freezed right away (mouse was movable, but could not click anything, or ALT+TAB to any other window)
17) did CTRL + ALT + DEL in the hope it will either cleanly shut down the file system or allow me to use top
18) the text menu showed up, I chose to start top, just to see if there were any odd processes running --> none, just the usual stuff (so IF there have been modifications to the files, the binary that caused the modifications were not running anymore)
19) left top again and returned to desktop
20) after a short black screen the desktop was shown again, greeting me with an error message "Drive C:" (the window showing the contents of C:\) has crashed --> I clicked the "close" button
21) the whole XWP was gone all of sudden, showing only the desktop background image and the usual icons --> after another short while, XWP came back and looked normal again.
22) checked "Drive C:" button again in Tree Mode, just to find out, it's all back again
23) checked the "Drive C:" properties --> "include" tab --> everything as it was and should be: "display anything that has no hidden flag", no weird smilies and PlayTime anymore..
24) fired up Firefox 45.x (experimental release from ArcaOS EXP repository) to open up this thread
25) closed everything and restarted ArcaOS like usual via button --> selected normal restart --> Click on the "OK" button
26) the status box on the lower left bottom displaying messages about the shutdown, like usual, but at one point it tried to umount the root partition "C:", showing "Exception unmounting C:" --> then it tried again, and it worked out.
27) passing POST again, ArcaOS booted up, passed chkdsk (as no dirty bit was set, as it seems), passed all the driver outputs, and between the last driver and the start of the ArcaOS GUI, the machine hung up (forever.. and I needed to push the reset button)
28) booting again, dirty bit was set, so chkdsk was ran this time --> found everything to be okay, passed the drivers, and finally loaded the ArcaOS GUI again.
29) checked "Drive C:" and its properties, but everyhting was normal
30) tried to reproduce from step 8 to 11, but could not get back the "Playtime" effect.

And from then on everything was normal again. No oddities anymore.

=--> I will boot Linux from stick again, mount the ArcaOS volume again, like back then, etcetc.. to try if this acually is a file system error, resulting from writing to that partition from outside of ArcaOS.


For an infection, I see almost no potential.. maybe besides checking e-mail (containing no spam mails though..)
The only unusual thing was the test of smartmontools and the mount and umount of the ArcaOS system partition (JFS) under Gentoo Linux, which might have damaged the file system... but then again, the effect should have happened way earlier. This was days ago, and I used the machine in the meanwhile.


DougB> If you see that every time, it may be interesting to use DFSEE to capture it, and see if JvW can tell what happened. You would need a subscription to DFSEE.

Hmm.. I'd say, I'll have an eye on this, and if "the effect" comes back, we can still consider using DFSee. : ))

Andreas Schnellbacher:
I haven't read the entire thread. It looks to me as if EAs got lost. I guess you've already made a chkdsk /f from another partion, as Dave wrote.

To fix this, you should restore from a backup. If you don't have one, you can try to delete EAs of a few files and folders. Note that the WPS needs EAs to work, so don't simply delete all. At first, create a new backup.

The Include setting that you describe is most-likely saved in a folder's .CLASSINFO EA. File objects like files and dirs store such info there. Abstract objects use OS2.INI, I don't remember the ini application anymore.

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