I'm curious about how cable management was typically done on the H960
cabinets when stuffed with peripherals... by DEC field engineers. As I've
racked up several peripherals for my 11/34 and tonight I was racking the
last bits I want to go with my 11/45 - the problem becomes rather obvious.
Put two RL0x's in a cab right together and you quickly realize it's a pain
cause the cables from the top one drag on the bottom drive (making it come
out too) when when pulling it out to mount platters, etc.
If you leave enough slack for the cable to go out with the drive, it'll get
caught when pushing the drive back and such. In some of the later white
"corporate cabs" I have seen (and have) spring loaded bars to ziptie the
cables to. However, I suspect this particular arrangement wasn't done on the
older H960 cabs generally - when they first came out and all.
I haven't come across much in any of the installation manuals I've seen that
really talk about routing the power and data cables in an H960 for
peripherals that slide out the front and lock on chassi-trak rails. What was
usually done historically in the field?
I can jerry rig something that will work... but I'd rather find out what was
done as installed by DEC installers at the time. I'd appreciate any advice,
pointers to manuals I must not be finding, etc.
And yes, this means I'm getting ready to revisit my 11/45 restoration. Where
I left it off, the thing was basically running (booting xxdp and running
some diags) but it had a problem with interrupts. No matter what device
interrupted, it always got a constant vector (3 or 4 or 0, I forget what).
I'm hoping Tony can direct me on how to troubleshoot that when I get back to
it. Before I start troubleshooting I need to go back and refamiliarize
myself with the box (check where I had jumpers for NPR removed, recheck all
the power supplies, move all the cards back to a sane test setup). After
that I'll be asking the wise ones here for direction :)
Jay West