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System beeps through onboard speaker...

Started by NNYITGuy, 2010.05.17, 19:22:41

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NNYITGuy

Hello All,

I have an eCS v.12MR system that beeps.  On on those sounding beeps that raises the hair on your neck every time your hear it.  I have not been able to get the timing down, but the beep happens maybe once every 10 minutes and sometimes shorter...  I have checked POPUPLOG.OS2 and nothing recent is listed.  I have no idea where else to check or what could be causing the beep...

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
-Todd
Todd J Simpson (IT Consultant)
Business Automation Technologies
(Professional Products and Services.  Business to Business...)

RobertM

#1
Quote from: NNYITGuy on 2010.05.17, 19:22:41
Hello All,

I have an eCS v.12MR system that beeps.  On on those sounding beeps that raises the hair on your neck every time your hear it.  I have not been able to get the timing down, but the beep happens maybe once every 10 minutes and sometimes shorter...  I have checked POPUPLOG.OS2 and nothing recent is listed.  I have no idea where else to check or what could be causing the beep...

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
-Todd

I have run into such beeps for a variety of unrelated reasons:

(1) failing hard drive (depends on the system BIOS)

(2) errors not generating the type of failure that would be logged to popuplog.os2 (various *nix ports for instance and certain OS/2 apps, that arent crashing, but handling an error and exiting)

(3) certain programs sending a notification to the system speakers (most notable I have run into are UPS utitilities)

(4) certain IM clients generating notification sounds

(5) sounds->speaker drivers generating such sounds via the mobo speaker

(6) some timed routine that is failing for some reason (eCS clock utility?, eCS scheduler utility?)

(7) certain WPS class issues or extension issues will cause this as well (including various settings on xWorkplace/eWorkplace and/or Styler/2 related to changing the priority of certain WPS threads). There is a setting in one or more of them that actually will MAKE your system beep on a priority change for the threads they utilize. When I enabled that, it drove me crazy until I realized that it was changing thread priority all the time on a regular basis, making my system beep like yours regularly.



Thus, the questions that would follow are:


Have you changed any xWorkplace/eWorkplace/Styler2/eStyler settings? If so, check out #7.

How many beeps on each occurrence? Long or short beep(s)? Are they exactly ten minutes apart (+/- a few seconds) - if so, definitely see #6 and #7?

Have you tried disabling anything that fits in category #6?

Does categories #3-5 apply?

Have you downloaded and tried the smartmon utility (findable on Hobbes) to ensure it is not an error status being detected by the mobo for a hard drive?  (category #1)

Lastly, and usually not important except as it applies to category #6 and out of resource issues... what version of REXX are you running (CREXX/OREXX)?

That's all I can think of right now - but I just woke up, so I am sure I missed a lot of possibilities.


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Pete

Hi Todd

I had a similar problem with a beeping system a couple of months back.

I tried rebooting - and Boot Manager failed to appear. The system sat there with a blinking cursor and nothing else happening.

My 1st attempt to boot using an eCS install CD failed to see either of my hard drives.

My 2nd attempt worked though. After using LVM to reinstall the Boot Manager the system booted fine and there were no more beeps.

I do wonder if some sort of WinVirus/Rootkit had caused the problem or whether eCS had mucked up Boot Manager all by itself...

Regards

Pete

NNYITGuy

Thanks Pete,

But my rebooting is normal and the beep comes back.  I do not personally touch this computer everyday, but I have on occassion remoted to it and then find that the drives tools in eCenter just shows the drives and no sub-folders.  I was wondering if the WPS is running out of resources.  But all the other apps eAMP and VirtualPC/2 along with ZXMail and Peter Moylan's FTP server and MR/ICE all run fine with no problems for months and months... Just the annoying beep that just happens periodically...

-Todd
Todd J Simpson (IT Consultant)
Business Automation Technologies
(Professional Products and Services.  Business to Business...)

ivan

There is also the possibility that Daniela's drivers are trying to tell you something about your disks
Quote
    If you hear short beeps, then the data transfer state-machine encountered
    an exception: a high beep indicates a UDMA CRC failure, a low beep an error
    reported by the hardware which leads to a interface reset eventually,
    and a middle beep indicates a command timeout (usually caused by a
    spun-down harddisk). So, if your hardware works 'flawlessly' you will hear
    *no* sounds from the driver (except for spin-down events of course). With
    'flawlessly' I mean 'without errors detectable by any instance'. If you
    prefer to ignore hardware errors indicated by these beeps, add the
    /!AA (no audible alerts) option.

taken the the driver doc.

As with all beeps from the system, it depends on pitch, number and speed - without that information it is very hard to advise.

ivan

RobertM

Quote from: ivan on 2010.05.17, 21:59:38
There is also the possibility that Daniela's drivers are trying to tell you something about your disks
Quote
    If you hear short beeps, then the data transfer state-machine encountered
    an exception: a high beep indicates a UDMA CRC failure, a low beep an error
    reported by the hardware which leads to a interface reset eventually,
    and a middle beep indicates a command timeout (usually caused by a
    spun-down harddisk). So, if your hardware works 'flawlessly' you will hear
    *no* sounds from the driver (except for spin-down events of course). With
    'flawlessly' I mean 'without errors detectable by any instance'. If you
    prefer to ignore hardware errors indicated by these beeps, add the
    /!AA (no audible alerts) option.

taken the the driver doc.

As with all beeps from the system, it depends on pitch, number and speed - without that information it is very hard to advise.

ivan

Oh, how I wished I had read those docs a couple months ago before one of my SATA drives entirely died. I figured out what the beeps meant in retrospect obviously...  ;D

At least now I know it was Dani's driver and not the BIOS giving me the beep errors. Thanks Ivan!!! Next time I will not ignore such beeps (not so much that I was ignoring them as barely noticed them over the sounds of all the server fans and drives spinning at once).


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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ivan

Hi Robert,

It is always wise to read all the docs pertaining to a piece of equipment.  So says a person that for many years wrote them.

That being said I am damned with having a photographic memory for the written word - makes it very difficult to read for pleasure, read a book once, come back to it a few years later and I can say what is on the next page from any given random page.  It's also helped with work, and yes I too have been caught out by not reading the fine manual - well actually the fine manual wasn't very well written, just a few cryptic remarks that had no real meaning unless you were the programmer.  I hate that typ of documentation.

ivan


RobertM

Quote from: ivan on 2010.05.18, 01:40:23
Hi Robert,

It is always wise to read all the docs pertaining to a piece of equipment.  So says a person that for many years wrote them.

That being said I am damned with having a photographic memory for the written word - makes it very difficult to read for pleasure, read a book once, come back to it a few years later and I can say what is on the next page from any given random page.  It's also helped with work, and yes I too have been caught out by not reading the fine manual - well actually the fine manual wasn't very well written, just a few cryptic remarks that had no real meaning unless you were the programmer.  I hate that typ of documentation.

ivan

LoL! I did read the instructions - on the first few versions I manually installed. When I installed eCS, there was no such documentation in the QuickStart Guide, so having read earlier documentation, I did not dig any deeper. The times I have upgraded the driver, I simply read the installation/upgrade notes, and thus missed the part about beep codes during that round as well.

Regardless, the few times I noticed the beeps, I presumed it was one of the 3 UPS units that the server sits on, as they have a tendency to beep from time to time - so, even having dug deeper into the notes and instructions for the newer versions of the Dani Driver, I never would have suspected that the beep was anything related to the server (as opposed to the UPS units).


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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