david@WUBIOS.WUSTL.EDU ("David J. Camp") (07/27/89)
Note that we are working on getting most of the SIMTEL20 archives
mirrored on wuarchive. -David-
Bitnet: david@wubios.wustl ^ Mr. David J. Camp
Internet: david%wubios@wucs1.wustl.edu < * > Box 8067, Biostatistics
uucp: uunet!wucs1!wubios!david v 660 South Euclid
Washington University (314) 36-23635 Saint Louis, MO 63110
Forwarded message:
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From chris@wugate Wed Jul 26 14:37:49 1989
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 89 14:32:31 CDT
From: Chris Myers <chris@wugate>
Message-Id: <8907261932.AA10463@wugate.wustl.edu>
To: netmgr_list@wugate
Subject: Status of wuarchive
To past, present and future users of wuarchive, the Washington University
Public Archive system...
WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING WITH WUARCHIVE?!
Those of you who have been NFS mounting the /archive partition from
wuarchive recently have almost certainly noticed a number of times
when your connection to wuarchive was hung. Because of the many
crashes suffered by wuarchive, if currently have the archives mounted
via NFS you should unmount and remount them. For this we apologize
and offer the following explanation and information:
Wuarchive is a DECstation 3100 with two Imprimis (CDC) Wren V 600MB
disks and an Exabyte 2GB tape drive. When the system was first set up
it was running a Field Test version of Ultrix 3.0, which was buggy.
As it later turned out, so were both of the disk drives.
Older models of the Imprimis Wren V drives (those with Firmware
Revision Level 5911) had a problem which only shows up on very fast
machines. This problems manifests itself by locking up the SCSI bus
of the computer, forcing a hardware reset and reboot. This happened
every few days to wuarchive... Then Ultrix 3.1 came out and it was
20% FASTER than 3.0 -- the crashes came more frequently, up to several
daily. [note: the firmware revision levels are not numbered
sequentially, or even in any particular order: 5911, 5466, 5946]
Both of the faulty drives have been replaced by our VERY helpful
dealer and everything is working without a hitch. We expect uptime
for wuarchive to be much closer to 100% now that everything has been
fixed -- it is now a production machine and we will try to announce in
advance any [planned] downtime.
For anyone who doesn't know about wuarchive, here is a bit of propaganda:
Wuarchive.wustl.edu contains a large archive of Public Domain
software. This service, which is offered at no cost by the Office of
the Network Coordinator, is available to any interested party. You
may freely mount the archives on your system via the Network File
System (NFS) or access it via Anonymous FTP.
Currently the archive contains over 390 Megabytes of software for Unix
systems, Macintosh and IBM PC compatible computers; there are also
hundreds of documents detailing various standards used throughout the
Internet, bug fixes for various operating systems, all of the packages
offered by the GNU project and complete source to the X11 windowing
system.
If your system supports NFS you may mount the archives by using a
command similar to the one below:
# mount wuarchive:/archive /archive
To access the archives via FTP, the username is 'anonymous' and the
password is 'guest'.
Chris Myers
Software Engineer
Office of the Network Coordinator