Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site milo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!mgnetp!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!hao!seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!milo!eric From: eric@milo.UUCP Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: Re: UDA50/RA81 problems.... Message-ID: <715@milo.UUCP> Date: Thu, 16-Aug-84 09:52:29 EDT Article-I.D.: milo.715 Posted: Thu Aug 16 09:52:29 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 19-Aug-84 03:06:18 EDT References: <12389@sri-arpa.UUCP> Organization: JHU/Applied Physics Lab, Laurel, MD Lines: 33 I would like to thank dave for clearing up a mystery that has plagued me for some time. We have three 11/780s, all with RA81s. After 6 months with no problems, one of them decided to go berserk, occasionally going offline, etc. The other two continued to perform flawlessly. Sounds like hardware, right? DEC replaced all the controller boards, all the drives, the memory, and most of the cpu, with no success. Finally, we installed a different driver, which ostensibly only allowed support for ra60s, no mention of change to how the drive was handled. Lo and behold, the problem went away. (I should mention that the first driver was apparently acquired from within DEC, the second, correct, one came over the net. Just goes to show who you should trust). Anyway, I went back and checked, and sure enough, the second driver does not issue the Get_Unit_Status command. Now, there are still some un-answered questions, such as why that particular machine started having problems, since it is not the most heavily loaded system, and we tried swapping things all over the two unibuses to try and minimize the possibility of unibus contention being the problem. Also, once the problem started appearing, it got to the point where the system would fail with only a few people on, mostly idle. Anyway, thanks again for clearing up why the problem go fixed. On a side note, I would like to mention that the local DEC people knew next to nothing about the drive and MSCP in general (in fact, I have all of the "official" documentation that DEC gives them - it is hand written explanations of some of the more common error codes), but to be fair, DEC did fly in an expert to meet with us who was knowledgable about the drive. He also was not able to isolate the problem, but it does seem to be a subtle one. Anyone know if Ultrix has a correct driver? -- eric ...!seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!eric