jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) (12/29/90)
We recently received a VT-1200 X terminal, which I spent the past week
trying to get working. I have run into several very serious problems
with it, and I need to know if I am doing something wrong, of if this
thing is really as broken as it seems:
- The terminal gets completely hung, quite often. This is usually,
but not always, associated with the screen-saver coming on. When
it happens, the only way to recover is to reboot.
- The terminal crashes with an "Illegal instruction" error message,
and puts some sort of dump information on the screen. This does
not happen nearly as often as the previous problem, though.
- Connections can not be maintained (or sometimes even established)
reliably. We have DECsystem 3100s running Ultrix 3.1, Vaxstation
2000, IBM RS/6000 and IBM RT/PC. When we establish an LAT terminal
connection to the DECsystems, it always cuts off after one or two
commands, with a message of "LAT connection lost" or some such.
When we establish a telnet connection to the DECsystem, it just
hangs after one or two commands, and never comes back. It is
generally not possible to even get a telnet connection established
to either type of IBM system, although we occasionally get lucky -
but even then it cuts off after a short time, just like the others.
By the way, we use the ethernet extensively between all of the
systems, we can use telnet between the DEC and IBM systems with
no problem, and we have a number of DECserver 200 boxes connected
which use LAT to the DECsystems with no trouble, so all of this
is apparently failure of the VT-1200.
We have had the DEC service technician come out, but he didn't have
much to say that was worthwhile. He said there are "lots of known
problems with the X terminals", and that some of them had been fixed
by a new prom (or proms), but not all of them... We still haven't
received any new proms, or any other help for that matter.
It seems to me, though, that these problems are so serious that there
must actually be something wrong with our terminal. The thing is just
completely useless in this state, and I can't imagine that DEC has been
selling these things like this.
So, if anyone knows anything about these problems, I would appreciate
very much hearing about it. In fact, it would also be useful just to
hear from a few people who actually have VT-1200 terminals in use with
DECsystem or Vaxstations running Ultrix.
Thanks.
jwnmr@athena.mit.edu (Noel Nachtigal) (01/08/91)
I have a VT-1000 which will talk LAT as a vt or TCP/IP as an X client. Everything works fine, although it is slow. I just got the 1000=>1200 upgrade today, which is said to improve speed. DEC claimed that this machine would talk LAT as an X-client to ULTRIX, but it doesn't and the docs link LAT-X to VMS only. They now claim that the upgrade will allow LAT-X-ULTRIX, but the docs with the upgrade say nothing about it. Does anyone actually have LAT-X-ULTRIX working with this animal? How about with any brand of X-term? Reply to xmeyer@chf.mit.edu, please. Thanks.