Hi,

as some will have noticed anoncvs.netbsd.org was down most of today.

It's found a new trick to die of its bit flipping, it gets strange input
from the disk controller and panics; it did so thrice today, once for
every partition it has mounted, and it paniced of the same yesterday.
I think that the error pattern is best explained by the PCI controller
not always delivering the data it has collected; sometimes flipped bits
arrive at the CPU from the periphery, well known to occasionally do that
from the ethernet controller (thus, no hardware checksumming allowed),
and now the disk controller too.
Strictly speaking it's a lucky break if the bit error panics the machine,
if it's in data it'll just cause strange build failures or even, strange
crashes of the machines that run the resulting software.

I don't know about you, I for one am royally peeved by this hardware
and think it has to go. Since The NetBSD Foundation is probably not
exactly wallowing in money, I've furthered this opinion with a donation
to TNF for this purpose (paypal willing/working).

If all you out there that use anoncvs just throw a fiver or tenner into
that hat (no matter what currency :) too, TNF should be able to at least
get the mainboard replaced with something that doesn't have bit rot.

regards,
	spz

PS: this is not a solicitation by TNF, but by my hearts desire to kick
that box into orbit. (A decaying one ending in a nice crater would be
just fine. Send pix.)
-- 
spz@serpens.de (S.P.Zeidler)