doug@marque.UUCP (harris) (06/24/87)
We have AT&T 3B5s as the main machines for our department; one has been in place for almost 3 years, and two have been in place for about a year and a half. All are under maintenance by AT&T. Unfortunately for the past year two of them have been subject to frequent crashes, which result in a flurry of board-swapping by the local maintenance folks, or replacement of disks and so on. The problems usually recur a month or so later. There have been a variety of reorganizations of the maintenance by AT&T and the hotline, but all continue to exhibit the characteristics above. My question is: what kind of experience do other folks have? Is there something we can do locally (other than lean on AT&T) do improve this situation? Are there organizations other than AT&T to which we can turn? The local AT&T folks, and the hotline folks, appear to try very hard to improve matters, but to no avail. They so far have never tried any crash dump analysis, to diagnose the cause of the problems, or at least try to. Is it normal that this is not done? Should we be receiving some sort of explanation after the crash, other than "we replaced board X". We (want to) like our AT&T hardware very much; it was certainly very reliable for a while. But we need suggestions as to what we can do, other than rely upon AT&T to live up to their agreements. Doug Harris, ...!uwvax!marque!doug dougbass,ss
rjd@tiger.UUCP (06/26/87)
> We have AT&T 3B5s as the main machines for our department; one has > been in place for almost 3 years, and two have been in place for > about a year and a half. All are under maintenance by AT&T. > Unfortunately for the past year two of them have been subject > to frequent crashes, which result in a flurry of board-swapping > by the local maintenance folks, or replacement of disks and so on. > The problems usually recur a month or so later. Sounds like it might be power surges......
doug@marque.UUCP (harris) (06/27/87)
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately the one machine with the most problems is sitting adjacent to the one with very few problems; although they are on different circuits, they are on the same power source. The machine with the "medium" amount of problems is in a separate building, about half a block away.
ken@argus.UUCP (Kenneth Ng) (06/29/87)
In article <1712@marque.UUCP>, doug@marque.UUCP (harris) writes: [edited query on AT&T 3b5 machines] > My question is: what kind of experience do other folks have? > Is there something we can do locally (other than lean on AT&T) > do improve this situation? Are there organizations other than > AT&T to which we can turn? > Doug Harris, This place has 2 such machines (actually they are now 3b15 machines). Last year a drive on the one upstairs broke down and was out of service for a couple months. This year a drive down here broke and was out for a couple of weeks. ... This signature was put in in a way to bypass the ... bogus artificial line limit on the .signature file. ... Also, by its length it adds fodder to help avoid having ... my followups being bounced due to the restriction on ... followup articles. Kenneth Ng: Post office: NJIT - CCCC, Newark New Jersey 07102 uucp !ihnp4!allegra!bellcore!argus!ken *** NOT ken@bellcore.uucp *** bitnet(prefered) ken@orion.bitnet