krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) (01/28/89)
I thought I'd pass along some bits of info that I've gleaned through much hard work. It may save someone else some grief ... 1) You need either SR9.7.1 or SR9.7.2 (or SR10) to run an DN3500. If you have the new 690MB disk drive (or, I'm told, the FPA or the fast graphic options), then you need SR9.7.2. However, The SR9.7.2 version of /sau7/salvol can not handle the new disk. The /com/salvol version can. If you need to salvage your disk, you must boot the node diskless off of another SR9.7.2 machine, bring up AEGIS, login and MTVOL your local disk, run /com/salvol, shut the machine down, and reboot it off of its own disk. 2) Do *not* bindly load SR9.7.2 onto all of your machines! Load it only on machines which require it. I made this mistake. We have another DN3500 with a 350MB disk and a floppy which I loaded SR9.7.2 onto. We were able to run WBAK/RBAK to the floppy disk, but if we formatted the floppy and mounted it, /com/cpt would fail with disk controller busy errors if the hard disk or the network controller were active during the transfer. Loading SR9.7.1 onto this DN3500 solved this problem. 3) I loaded SR9.7.2 onto our DN3000's that we use as our master software repositories. These machines had been running SR9.7.0.4 in order to correct some bugs in the GPIO system (more on this later). The SR9.7.2 installation seems to install the SR9.7.0 files into /sau8, ie. If we do a BLDT on these DN3000's we do not see "SR9.7.2" returned, we see the same "SR9.7" and the same time/date that the machines which were not updated to SR9.7.0.4! Do *not* install SR9.7.2 onto DN3000's , it will remove your patches! 4) If you are running SR9.7.0 on a DN3000 (and possibly other AT-bus machines) with a floppy disk *and* you have other devices which perform 8-bit DMA, the floppy disk will get spurious errors if it is running while the other DMA device is transferring data. Devices which perform 16-bit DMA do not interfere with the floppy. This problem is fixed with SR9.7.0.4 and/or SR9.7.1, the SR9.7.2 installation re-installs this bug (as previously mentioned) on the DN3000's by installing the old SR9.7.0 /sau8 directory. Many of these errors appear to be hardware errors. Our field service personnel (bless them!) spent many *days* attempting hardware fixes while the regional support persons looked for possible software fixes, and in all cases it has turned out to be a software bug mascarading as a hardware glitch. -- David Krowitz krowitz@richter.mit.edu (18.83.0.109) krowitz%richter@eddie.mit.edu krowitz%richter@athena.mit.edu krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet (in order of decreasing preference)
dbfunk@ICAEN.UIOWA.EDU (David B. Funk) (01/28/89)
WRT posting <8901272345.AA03051@richter.mit.edu> and 690Mbyte disks, We just got in a DN4500 with a 690Mbyte disk. The DN4500 needs sr9.7.3 to boot up, the off-line salvol (/sau7/salvol) that comes with that release will handle the 690Mbyte disks OK.