Orphan HP Alphaservers looking for a new home

[Peter Coghlan]

On Tue, 18 Dec 2018, Richard Loken via cctalk wrote:

>
> I also know that the DS20 mother boards had hardware on them such as USB
> controllers and maybe SCSI controllers that were not supported by either
> OS.
>

I recall having a retired DS20 doing light duties back at the office.  It
used to crash occasionally and somebody found it was still on the maintenance
contract so we got the DEC (or whatever they were called that week) engineer
to take a look at it.  He declared that the internal disk being plugged into
the onboard SCSI controller was the source of the problem because this
configuration was not supported by VMS.  We were somewhat surprised by this
as we thought that "not supported" in this context meant that VMS probably
didn't have a driver for the onboard controller at some point in the past but
it must have been added since because it seemed to work fine when we tried it.

There were no further problems after a PCI SCSI controller was added and the
disk was plugged into this instead.

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.