rion@FORD-WDL1.ARPA (Rion Cassidy) (03/17/88)
I want to get some feedback from those of you have had significant experience with SGI equipment. From our experiences either SGI hardware is very low quality or we have a lemon. It is important for us to know which because we have to make a decision regarding the purchase of a new machine soon. I will explain; you judge for yourself. I am not trying to run down SGI, just explain the facts. Our IRIS 3120 was originally purchased in November 1986. In July 1987 we started having intermittent RAM parity problems. This is the sort of problem that stops the IRIS dead in its tracks and frequently can ruin files. The SGI tech came out six different times, each time saying, "we're pretty sure it's fixed *this* time." Finally, after some angry phone calls, the sixth visit (in October) seemed to do the trick. Perhaps we had an elusive, unusual problem that no one else could've solved any faster. In January we started getting error messages about track errors on the disk. These seemed pretty innocous at first since no real harm was being done. First the tech came out and made some disk configuration changes and rebooted the system. That seemed to work for a couple of weeks until the same error message started popping up again. The decision then was to reformat the disk, eliminating the spurious bad sector messages. Trouble here was that my backup of the system apparently was not successful; tar got conflicting file sizes on many files. We didn't realize this until the disk had been reformatted and we were trying to restore everything. The backup tape was trash, a month's work was lost. The IRIS only worked for a while after that. In February we were getting occasional error messages about the fbc and font ram (I never did figure out what that meant!). We reported this but before they had a chance to attempt a fix, the disk went completely south. There were continous I/O error messages and it wouldn't reboot. So now they had to give us a new disk. This problem cost a week of access time and lost work. The gotcha on the repair was that the new disk would only run under SGI's system release 3.6 (new model, not previously supported I imagine). Our backup was an entire dump of the disk. The new disk had just release 3.6, no user files, and doing a complete restoration would wipe out the new operating system without which we couldn't use the disk. So we had to do a file by file restore in some cases (we were foolish enough to have used SGI's 'backup' program which splits directories between tape cartridges). It seems to be OK now. Occasionally when I put a tape in the drive and attempt a tar command the system locks up. Drive light off, no response on the console. Should I call in on this too? We've got Sun workstations all over the place and they don't seem to have anywhere near as many hardware problems. In our estimation, the total of system down time and lost work comes to about 10%. When it comes in large chunks during critical development periods it seems a lot worse. My question: have other SGI users had problems with this frequency? Or do we just have a lemon? Are repeated visits for the same problem normal in the world of hardware maintenance? Any feedback would be appreciated. If there is sufficient and interesting responses, I will post a summary. P.S. I solved the problem with kermit crashing (discussed in a previous posting). It has to be installed in /bin *and* /usr/bin or else it will crash when a send is attempted. Rion Cassidy Ford Aerospace rion@ford-wdl1.arpa ...{sgi,sun,ucbvax}!wdl1!rion Disclaimer: The above is solely the opinion of the author.