bfs4, a fileserver that primarly servers web resources and the like, was unintentionally "paused" during the console server work yesterday. Once it was notied, it was 'unpaused', and everything seemed to recover fine. This outage affected parts of the MyUMBC environment, including webadmin, and class schedules.
SUN systems, by default, respond to a "break" signal on their serial console line as a signal to drop to prom. Our console server, when turned off, causes what electrically looks like a "break" to be sensed on it's console lines. In order to get around this, we have configured the suns to support an "alternate" break sequence so that this doesn't happen. For whatever reason (prom version, something!), bfs4 didn't seem to accept this configuration change, and happily "halted" when we turned off the console server. We'll note that there were MANY other similar Sun systems connected to this console server when we turned it off, and THEY didn't seem to have a problem with it...