AlphaServers

[Peter Coghlan]

>
> Several people have now mentioned they have dead Alphas. What is generally
> failing about them?
>

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.