X-Envelope-to: NOVELL@SUVM.BITNET
X-VMS-To: IN%"NOVELL@SUVM.BITNET"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.novell
Date:         Fri, 2 Oct 1992 10:51:00 EST
Reply-To:     Novell LAN Interest Group <NOVELL@SUVM.BITNET>
From:         "Russell Aminzade: Trinity College of VT" <AMINZADE@UVMVAX.BITNET>
Subject:      "Server Not Found" problems

Hope this isn't too long, but I'm at wits end.

We've been having a very frustrating series of "server not found"
errors on our machines as they attempt to boot from boot ROMS on
the cards.

Initially the problem occurred occasionally in random machines,
and frequently on one machine.  We replaced the card on the one
machine, and it behaved fine.  Then (on a weekend, of course,
just as a class of 20 students was sitting down to simultaneously
use the machines and while I was at home) all hell broke loose.
About ten of the machines refused to boot, giving the "server not
found" error.  Grrr.  Class cancelled.

The plot thickens a bit here.  When I returned on Monday I was
getting quite a few "server not found" errors on many machines.
I also noted that power had gone out over the weekend, the night
before the.  However, it was only out for 10 seconds, and,
according to the system error log our BACK-UPS UPS kicked in and
the server never shut down.

Yesterday, while I was out sick, the same thing happened.  Some
folks couldn't boot, and others lost their connection in
mid-session (producing things like printer timeouts and "file
XXXX not found" messages from WordPerfect when it couldn't find
overflow files).  When I dragged my feverish and aching body in
to the lab, I discovered that the power had again gone out the
night before.  In this instance, power was out for an hour (late
at night with nobody logged in), the UPS shut down the server,
and the server came up again when power was restored.

For some reason (at least until we noticed that the power was out
in both situations), we suspected cable problems -- though this
would be odd, since machines "downstream" from the ones unable to
find the server were booting just fine.  Some history here:

We decided to go with pre-cut cables to increase reliability,
since I had heard all kinds of weird stories about cable problems
when people "rolled their own."  Come to find out, however, that
that the company we bought them from used twist-on, not crimp-on
cables.  We could have done that ourselves.  These people also
insisted on making no cable shorter than 5 feet (they said that
shorter lengths would be unreliable, though Novell specifies a
minimum length of 1.5' in the docs).

We checked the resistance of the cabling with a VOM today  (leads
attached to center and shell one "direction" at a time...).  It
was around 50-70 everywhere.  Averaged around 57 or so. It seemed
to increase by a couple of ohms each cable length.  This seems
like more resistance that I'd expect in a 5-foot length.  I'm no
whiz with a VOM and the digital display seemed to move around
quite a bit.  Is this pretty close to spec or way off?

Configuration
Netware 3.11, IBM 386 SLC Server, Kodiak cards in the
workstations w/ the boot ROMS.  27 Workstations (20 floppy
only!), an Appletalk segment with 6 macs and a laserwriter.

My current conclusion is that the network gets lonely if I don't
log in with my username, and refuses to boot any workstations.

The other possibility is that something is not right when the
server shuts down.  I might mention that the students here
(always logged in as "guest" ) don't always (how about "never")
log off of the server.  They tend to shut down the machine.  So
it's possible that some of them were still "logged on" at
shutdown time, and perhaps even had a file flagged as open.

Any speculation or ideas would be appreciated.