AlphaServers

The B-Cache on the CPU card on every Alphaserver 1000A I have laid eyes on has failed at some point. It can be disabled with a jumper but this makes the machine a lot slower for some tasks. I have also had problems with intermittent shutdowns for no reason on these machines, probably due to failures in the thermal protection logic. Also possibly problems with the connector the CPU card sits in and just plain failure to do anything. The 115/230V power supply in my DEC 3000 / 300 decided to go permanently into 115V mode despite the power here being 230V which resulted in a bang. Removing the shorted triac and replacing the exploded VDR and fuse fixed that for a while but now the machine has some other problem that I can't recall. The monitor that was with it has some sort of EHT problem. My two DEC 3000 / 600 machines go through their power up tests, flashing the diagnostic LEDs nicely but don't boot or produce a console prompt afterwards. One of them went into this state when I was trying to reboot it remotely while it was in service. It really needed a reset or power cycle at the time but I couldn't do that remotely so I tried various not very likely to succeed console commands. I may have somehow damaged the firmware doing that or a fault may have arose coincidentally but I never got a console prompt since on it. The other one behaves the same as it but it started happening when noone was looking at it. Regards, Peter Coghlan.