friedl@vsi.UUCP (Stephen J. Friedl) (03/26/88)
Hi folks,
We have a customer with a 3B2/600 and a backplane full of
EPORTS cards (these are the ones with eight serial ports on them
with no parallel). Sixteen of the lines are connected to an AT&T
System 75 phone switch through MADUs (Mxxx Asynchronous Data
Units, probably), the rest are various terminals, printers, and
modems.
Basically, his problems are the same as everybody else
running EPORTS -- they go crazy all the time. He gets sanity
failures regularly, taking the board out of service, with the
entire machine going down shortly thereafter. He is running
EPORTS fix 1.1.1 but the boards still fry randomnly, usually
during a customer demo :-(. AT&T has replaced boards often with
no apparent success.
We have experienced difficulties ourselves with EPORTS
cards, especially on multiplexors or with hardware flow-control,
but not to this extent. His application -- automating a large
office of executive suites -- goes live next week and he is in an
absolute panic ("Hey Fred, wanna buy an NCR Tower?" ;-}. AT&T
says the Labs is working night and day on the EPORTS 1.2 fix and
it should be out in ten days. Apparently, nearly half their 3B2
Hotline calls are on EPORTS problems (no wonder).
We have already turned down the speed of everything to 4800
bps, have removed hardware flow-control from everything, and we
have examined our Center management software pretty extensively.
Is there anything in software that can make a port fry? On a
3B2/400, we have seen cases where running hardware flow-control
in a certain way would make a cartridge tape backup fail (we
didn't believe it at first either).
Any advice anybody can provide to this desperate man would
be very much appreciated. We are very comfortable with RS-232
and termio and can deal on that level if necessary. Many :-) to
the person who helps out.
Steve Friedl
V-Systems, Inc.
Santa Ana, California
(714) 545-6442
--
Steve Friedl V-Systems, Inc. *Hi Mom*
friedl@vsi.com {uunet,attmail,ihnp4}!vsi!friedl