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Messages - ivan

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1336
Setup & Installation / Re: Desktop restarting at midnight
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:16:12 pm »
Hi Andy,

I will admit it is a mystery.  There is nothing wrong with the power supply, all the voltages are normal as read from the bios health screen as well as the fact it is an Antec 600W supplying about 300W.

I do think the main problem is the mother board - it is 2001 vintage as are the CPU, memory and other cards with the exception of the video card which is 2004 vintage.

The initial 175Hz 'tone' lasts for 1.3 seconds, presumably because they know the rather indifferent nature of rural French power lines ;)

Yes I do know single and three phase power formulae having one of my degrees as an electrical engineer.  Twenty years ago the nominal single phase voltage was 220v giving a 380v three phase this has since been increased to a nominal 230v (actually it is higher) with something approaching 415v three phase.

In the new year I have updating all the computers as a project.  What motherboards we will use I haven't decided yet but they will be AMD CPUs and graphics cards.  If anyone wants to throw in a recommendation I would be pleased to have a look at it.
   

1337
Setup & Installation / Re: Desktop restarting at midnight
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:59:16 am »
Hi Doug,

Here we have 415v three phase which gives 230v between phase and neutral.  What they are doing is superimposing a 175Hz signal on the 50Hz supply.  The signal is like Morse Code with the first 'dash' being longer (I assume it is a wake up signal).

I don't see any way that a UPS can filter out that type of signal - the big 5Kw on the servers didn't and I assume the smaller ones on essential equipment don't either.

Regarding filters on incoming power lines, we can buy off the shelf filters designed to block the signals sent out by the 'home plug' type of network extenders (network using mains cables) so it shouldn't be too difficult to adapt them to block 175Hz as well.

My first thoughts as to what happens is that the 175HZ signal interacts with one or more of the crystal controlled frequencies in the computer which is seen by the software as a reset but that is only a thought.  On Monday I will give the problem to my service department to kick about and see if they come up with other ideas.

1338
Setup & Installation / Re: Desktop restarting at midnight
« on: December 12, 2014, 09:01:28 pm »
Thanks Doug, I've got the recording oscilloscopes set to start recording just before midnight and we'll see what transpires.

Nothing in popuplog Alex, apart from the normal complaints re soffice.bin throwing a hissy fit when oo4.1 is closed.

An Edit well after midnight:

Your point is well taken Doug - it was a control pulse sent down one of the phases of the three phase supply we have.  At midnight alternate street lights are turned off by a control signal and those that are turned off are on one phase.  The reason the computer started acting up was because when we changed the drive it was plugged back into a different socket, one that was powered by the phase that carried the switching signal.  Why the signal should do what it did requires more investigation but we will be looking at installing signal filters on all incoming power lines.

1339
Setup & Installation / Re: Desktop restarting at midnight
« on: December 12, 2014, 12:13:25 am »
Exactly at midnight (00:00:00) every day - I just watched it happen again.

This has been consistent all this week because I have watched it.  I can't say anything about the previous week because the guy on duty that week didn't use this box but I don't think it started just to annoy me.

Something has to be triggering it and I think I have looked at everything that might.  It can't be the backup timing, that doesn't kick in until 02:00 and it hasn't missed that at all.

I don't think it is triggered by the new hard disk - all the SMART test come up clean and the firmware passes the manufacturers tests.

I can see this remaining a puzzle until we retire the box.
 

1340
Setup & Installation / Re: Desktop restarting at midnight
« on: December 11, 2014, 08:51:30 pm »
Hi Martin,

It is WSeB with FP6 and any other fixes we could find applied.

It is just the WPS desktop restart - very like the xWorkplace restart desktop.  No it is not xWorkplace causing it because I uninstalled it on Tuesday and it still did it that night.

As I said we can live with it but it is a bit disconcerting when it happens when you are in the middle of doing something.  Another thing to note is that the image file was made two weeks before we had to replace the hard disk and it wasn't doing it up to then - it has only appeared after the new hard disk was installed and reimaged.

1341
Setup & Installation / Desktop restarting at midnight
« on: December 11, 2014, 05:33:54 pm »
I have a very strange problem.  One of our computers restarts the desktop at midnight.  I only noticed it because I have been on the night shift this week.

It is only this box - all the others stay stable with no hint of a restart at midnight, just as this box used to.  The only difference is that we had to replace the boot drive hard disk a couple of weeks ago and restore the image from backup.  Everything else on the machine works as it always did with all programs appearing where they were before the disk change.

We can live with it if we have to but I would be interested to know if anyone has seen this and if there is a way it can be fixed.

1342
Applications / Re: BrainStorm: Wish list for OS/2 and eComStation
« on: December 01, 2014, 11:42:24 pm »
Like Andy B, we, and our clients, are only interested in OS/2 being the host system for other virtualized OSs. 

It would be very nice to get an updated Vbox that would have the additions to allow us to test, for example, win 7.  At the moment win 7 runs but there is no way to get the additions to work with it which is a PITA.

1343
Hardware / Re: New X600's for SNAP users in the UK
« on: November 23, 2014, 04:58:13 pm »
Good find, but I do have to ask who doesn't use SNAP?

We have a range of ATI X550, X600 and X700 cards as well as a couple of NVIDIA FX5700 all quite happy to drive monitors to 1920 x 1200 @ 16m colours.

1344
Networking / Re: Secure qt4 browser
« on: November 12, 2014, 12:44:31 pm »
That would explain why I couldn't log in to a site that uses secure login.

1345
Events / Re: hobbes.nmsu.edu
« on: November 05, 2014, 08:06:21 pm »
Ian, that sounds as if they got the phone line numbers mixed up, that happened to us a couple of years ago (someone with a phone number xx xx xx xx 04 cancelled their line but it got mixed up with ours xx xx xx xx 40 - took ages to sort out, hope you do better).

1346
First of all read carefully what DFSee says about the disk - you may find there is some strange geometry or there is a hidden partition.

If there is anything strange correct that first then proceed with your list.

The only exception to that list is to make the partition HPFS - bootable JFS is not available in the early versions of eCS.

Here we always make a 1GB HPFS boot partition and one or more JFS partitions (depends on the size of the disk) for things like 'home', 'programs', etc.  That way it is simple to do OS updates without messing with installed programs, but again that is just personal preference. 

1347
Don't give up yet, there is a way round it.

For some reason old Dell computers tend to have had problems when anyone wanted to change the windows OS to anything else.  My way of dealing with that is to use either a floppy, where they had floppy drives, or a bootable CD with DFSee on them. http://www.dfsee.com/dfsee/download.php  The fact that they are DOS based makes no difference.

Boot from the floppy or CD and use DFSee to delete the partition on the disk (only problem with that is if you want to keep the windows version there) and then create the new partitions for eCS.

If you want to keep the windows that is there you need to first defrag that partition using windows tools then use DFSee to reduce the size of the windows partition to give you room for bootmanager (install with DFSee) and eCS (create partition with DFSee).

After that you should be able to install any version of eCS without problems.

1348
Storage / Re: NAS and OS/2?
« on: November 01, 2014, 11:36:46 pm »
At work we have a combination of D-Link DNS-320, DNS-323, DNS-343 and DNS345 NAS boxes fitted with 1TB to 4TB drives set up as RAID1.  All are accessed from our OS/2 machines using SAMBA and the built in FTP servers.  We also supply them to our OS/2 using clients.

At home I have a DNS-320, and a DNS-232, one with a 1.5TB RAID1 and the other with a 2TB RAID1.  These are used to backup my various OS/2 machines again using SAMBA and their built in FTP servers.  They are, in turn, backed up to a DNS-343 that is set up with two 3TB RAID1 arrays.

All NAS boxes have a gigabit network interface and are connected to the network gigabit switch.

In the five or so years that we have been using them we have never had a problem connecting them to OS/2 machines but there have been a few glitches with windows machines mainly because of how windows acts on the network (the windows machines were from clients, not ours).

1349
Hardware / Re: Motherboard woes
« on: October 31, 2014, 08:27:34 pm »
Hi Mark, the last person that told my service manager that the power supply was good was shown that the 3.3v DC was in fact only supplying 2.5v.  We hooked up a new power supply and the computer worked as it should. I should add here that you can generally use the 'health check' in the bios to see what the voltages are that the board sees from the power supply.

As for a new board, there are several that will work without problems - just make sure any with uefi bios have a way to switch it off.  I can't say anything about Intel CPU based boards - we use and supply AMD processors but that is a personal decision.

The computer I am using at the moment has a slightly older ASUS board - M4A78LT-M LE - with a 4 core AMD processor.  It has 2 x 1TB SATA disks and 2 x 2TB SATA disks, 4GB DDR3 memory and there are 1 x PCIe x 16, 1 x PCIe x 1 and 2 standard PCI slots, all powered with an 800w power supply.  Unfortunately the built in lan chip doesn't have an OS/2 driver but everything else works as expected.

All I can recommend is that you start by looking for boards that have the number of slots you require then look at their specifications and what chips they use for lan, sound etc.  Once you have a short list then download the user manuals and have a good look at the specifications summary and also check what special drivers they use.  Almost any board that will run Linux will run OS/2 - eCS.   

1350
Applications / Re: Edit pdf files
« on: October 15, 2014, 02:52:15 pm »
Hi Silvan,

You know that most people don't read the instructions when installing anything new  ;D  they generally try, fail and then complain hence my saying it would be an advantage if the required DLLs could be downloaded as one package.

Thanks for the information that Alex has produced something I will have to try and find it and do some tests.  It is one of the things that people trying OS/2 eCS that I know of complain about, the other is having gigabit network cards and not having drivers for them.

Thank you for the time and effort you put in to help keep our OS up and running.

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