Hi, my pulse is still at 100. Today I brought my second VAX 6000-400 into the basement. That thing is haunted! Bringing into the basement entails screwing everything off and then back on. Everything went so beautifully. Having it done the second time I noticed that the cables almost find their way by themselves, just listen to them and they show you how they want to be plugged in :-). Anyway, it didn't work very well. The XMI side alone could be made to work fine, but the VAXBI side doesn't want to work. I checked the wiring once, twice, there is really not much to it, just one big plug that goes into the power regulator and the two HUGE contacts for the actual power. Nothing difficult. I think I burned a couple of XBIA and XBIB boards today. Nothing went off in smoke or flames but one spare after the other would stop working right. I thought I'd do a little board-testing in my working VAX, but even there the things behaved strangely, even to the extent where I thought that may be one XBIA board destroyed the attached XBIB board and vica versa. Although I have accumulated a load of XBIA/XBIB boards my reserve went preciously low. I shot with almost all I had and there were quite a few casualties in the battle. But all to no avail. I'm lucky my working machine is back working again. But I should find a more efficient and less dangerous way to debug that other machine. There is just too much combinatorics involved in the trial and error method. There are 1 XMI bus 2 positions for XBIA 2 VAXBI busses, that are interconnected everything seems dependent on everything else here. How can this be decoupled so that I can test one thing at a time? The next I'll try is actually replace the VAXBI backplane cage. But what would DEC field service have done? Is there a technician's handbook that would give some ideas? thanks, -Gunther -- Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D. gschadow(a)regenstrief.org Medical Information Scientist Regenstrief Institute for Health Care Adjunct Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine tel:1(317)630-7960 http://aurora.regenstrief.org