I seem to remember issues with Alpha's even when new. I was asked to help out
somewhere running VMS on Alpha and we had a couple of failures on the CPUs over the few
months I was there...
.. contrast this with working on IBM xServers and we had over 100 servers and only ever
had failures on really old boxes, and then usually RAM or PSU.
In fact given this distaste folks have for NT derived OSs on Intel servers, its worthy
of note that even with around 120 boxes I wasn't leaping up and down every 5 mins
minutes to fix them.
Every 5 months perhaps one of the older ones would go crank but usually it was a 6 or
seven year old box that was well past its best before date...
Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Peter Coghlan
via cctalk
Sent: 13 March 2018 18:33
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: AlphaServers
When my 1000 started failing, the manual lead me to believe it was
b-cache, but the jumper map wound up to be wrong,
There are a number of variants and the manuals are extremely unclear.
it was actually failed RAM.
I forgot. I had that too. The firmware is supposed to specify which bank and
SIMM is faulty. Another reason to not love these machines:
If SIMM 0 has failed, the firmware reports a failure in SIMM 0.
If SIMM 1 has failed, the firmware reports a failure in SIMM 1.
If SIMM 2 has failed, the firmware reports a failure in SIMM 3.
If SIMM 3 has failed, the firmware reports a failure in SIMM 3.
Even knowing that, I?m not sure I want to invest hundreds in new RAM
for a machine whose b-cache is known to be a ticking time bomb. (1000s
and 1000As have notoriously unreliable b-cache)
I might be willing to swap my AS1000A RAM (some of which may be faulty
and I probably can't test it unless I can resurrect one of my machines briefly)
for memory for a PWS 500, Alphaserver 2100 or an Alphaserver 800.
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.