eichelbe@nadc.arpa (07/23/86)
If your site has had experience with EMC Corporation memory in a VAX 11/780, would you please comment, positively or negatively, on the reliability, serviceability or any other aspect of the product that may help our site in replacement memory selection. Our site would be interested in the 64K chip memory boards and controller. The EMC product numbers are EMCVT-780 and VX-1MB-780. Please reply directly to me. Thank you, Jon Eichelberger (eichelbe@NADC.ARPA) at the Naval Air Development Center
news@seismo.CSS.GOV (UseNet News) (07/23/86)
On June 17, we had two of our vax 780s (seismo and hugo) upgraded from 4Mbytes of old style memory to 16 Mbytes of new memory. These were the 4Mbyte boards with 256k chips, not the 1 M boards. While our experience was mixed, we are satisfied and would do it again. The installation on hugo was first. It took about 2 hours from halting the system to coming back up in production. It went flawlessly. Unix found the full 16 Mbytes, etc (This was 4.3BSD beta). Then we started on seismo. They discovered that they had two bad backplanes (the one for seismo and their spare). A different person came back a week later to try again with new backplanes. The installation of seismo took about SIX hours. Two to install the memory and FOUR hours of me and the CE arguing over whether Unix was broken since it only found 8 of the 16 M bytes. He claimed his diagnostics found the full 16Mbytes. Unix only found 8. The CE was your basic "I only understand VMS" type. However, his supervisor, who I talked to on the phone was a complete asshole. Had he been in the room with me, I probably would have hit him. I can understand the CE's not being familiar with Unix, but their supervisor should have some experience. The supervisor insisted that Unix could not see more than 8 Mbytes without modifications and that I obviously had not installed the modifications they had given me (These were for System 5 and totally useless). He also seemed unable to understand that there was more than 1 kind of Unix. I pointed out that the identical kernel running on the Vax they upgraded last week had happily found the full 16 M and I didn't believe it was a software problem. He didn't think the comparison was relevant. (He never did explain why) While we were arguing on the phone, the CE came back in and said that he rebooted the system and now Unix found the full 16Mbytes. He denied making any hardware changes, but our operator saw him fooling with some boards. I know the kernel hadn't changed. Anyway, we finally got the system up and both machines have been running fine ever since. I am still extremely pissed off at the EMC manager who I spoke to on the phone. I haven't run into that kind of anti-Unix paranoia in about 5 years (Remember what DEC field service was like when the Vax first came out? You pretty much had to make it fail under VMS before they would believe it was a problem). This cretin is giving EMC an undeservedly bad reputation. So, the short answer on EMC is that had we only had one system upgrade, they would have been perfect. But, based on the other one, they need some work in customer relations. Someone less experienced with Vaxes and Unix might have been intimidated into accepting a broken system. ---rick
kimery@wdl1.UUCP (07/24/86)
/ wdl1:net.unix-wizards / news@seismo.CSS.GOV (UseNet News) / 1:10 pm Jul 23, 1986 / }..... }The installation of seismo took about SIX hours. Two to install the }memory and FOUR hours of me and the CE arguing over whether Unix }was broken since it only found 8 of the 16 M bytes. He claimed his }diagnostics found the full 16Mbytes. Unix only found 8. The EMC 4 Meg memory boards have two modes to them. One is an interleaved mode and the other is non-interleaved (god isn't that amazing, how does he do it??). If you look at the 2 page Xerox documentation that comes with the stuff (I don't care who installs it, I always read the docs...) you will notice that the is a line that says to run diags do the following: DEP (something) EX (address) Then run the EMC diag, or the DEC diag3. (THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART) The docs also say to do another DEP to turn the memory back into interleaved mode. This does not happen automagically. Yes, if you do forget it only shows up as 8M instead of 16M. Yes, I forgot to do that in all the exitement, and it took me a few minutes to figure out what I had done wrong.... Sam Kimery kimery@ford-wdl1 decvax!sun!wdl1!kimery