bhilden@druxj.UUCP (HildenbrandBE) (02/01/85)
I have posted this article to net.general because I would like feedback from users of DEC equipment worldwide. If this is an innapropriate newsgroup I apologize in advance. Having the unenviable job as machine coordinator for 6 of the VAX 11/780s at the Denver AT&T site, I have been extremely frustrated by the high amount of downtime our machines have been experiencing. One VAX has been up less than 50% of the time over the last 3 months. These machines are not extremely loaded(I know, I was a student at University of Wisconsin and shared a VAX 11/780 with ~300 students). There are many facets to this problem. Our on-site DEC service personnel are good at fixing most problems however, when something out of the ordinary pops up the real trouble begins. The most common responses I hear from our DEC Service personnel is "well, you are running UNIX not VMS, our diagnostics don't run very well on UNIX" or "when a machine crashes running UNIX it wipes out all the important registers so we can't tell what happened" or "we ran the machine under VMS and it didn't crash -- we don't know what to do next" or "the machine wouldn't have crashed if it had been running VMS" etc., etc. I can't understand why DEC doesn't have diagnostics which run under UNIX and give meaningful results, after all a portion of the community does run UNIX on their VAXs. Secondly, DEC seems to be slow to escalate the problem if a solution is not readily apparent to the personnel on site. Being a hacker of sorts I understand the old shotgun approach to problem solving however, this method is totally innapproriate when you have customers waiting to use their computer. If the service rep says that the problem is either the VLSI Monitor or the Memory Power Supply then they should replace both right then and there(provided one is not a 10 minute job and the other is a 10 hour job) and test the two parts at their regional office to see which one was the problem for future reference. However, DEC seems to be reluctant to do this, I understand the economic factors but, IBM replaces the modules without hesitation(did they make more money than DEC last year?). As you can tell, I am pretty upset about the inability of DEC to repair our machines in a reasonable time. What I would like to know is this: Is this problem pretty widespread and if so are there any reasonable solutions? Bruce Hildenbrand ihnp4!druxj!bhilden p.s. - I am not trying to come down hard on our on site personnel this problem seems to be more of poor management of real trouble situations rather than of o single person's inability to do their job.