Re: Quick Tale: Lost production database because of keyboard and Veritas Cluster Server

On Thu, 28 Feb 2002, RSH wrote:

> Well regardless, (what IS this STOP-A stuff? I never heard it before, what

Stop-A is a keyboard combination on Sun keyboards. Stop-A is a way of uncerimoniously (sp?) dropping a Sun to the OBP.

> is it in ASCII... rut roh, please don't tell me they changed ASCII?!!), the

DOn't worry, it's not ASCII! :-)

> poor guy didn't do this on purpose, I don't believe; and you do have to
> admit regardless, that any single signal shouldn't trigger a mess like this
> without some 'are you really sure you want to create weeks of Hell for
> everyone in IT' screen, instead of dropping the system instantly.

Well, I guess the system assumes that it's set up properly, and that you know what you're doing. UNIX has a habit of doing that... :-)

> A physical button on the machine itself, okay. But not a signal that can be
> generated so easily and unintentionally, and that can't be redefined by the
> customer and at least be more than one keystroke separating life and death.

A couple of points: Stop-A is a keyboard combination, so it's pretty hard to type accidentally. Also, keyboards are not hot swappable devices, and finally, a (Sun) server shouldn't have a keyboard attached to it in the first place.

Serial consoles use an RS232 break signal to drop the machine to the OK prompt, but more recent systems can change this behaviour to a different sequence, or disable it altogether (I wouldn't recommened the latter: you never know when you DO want to stop the machine in it's tracks).

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Rich Teer

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