AlphaServers

[Dave Wade]

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.