INFO-VAX Mon, 31 Mar 2008 Volume 2008 : Issue 181 Contents: Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Re: Does POWER_OFF really work ? Download Range PC/ MOBILE /PSP [http://www.downloadrange.com] Re: RX3600 and VMS 8.3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:48:05 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Message-ID: <47f03531$0$23886$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com> As an indication of reliability, yesterday, for Earth Hour, I decided to shutdown one alpha. I figured I would use that opportunity to reboot the alpha in a special satellite mode without a local page file, allowing me to do an image backup of the main system disk to that workstation's disk. It had been so long since I rebooted a machine that i had to take out the boom for the magic incantation of the boot command to get it into sysboot mode. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:54:25 -0400 From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= Subject: Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Message-ID: <47f0444c$0$90270$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> JF Mezei wrote: > As an indication of reliability, yesterday, for Earth Hour, I decided to > shutdown one alpha. I figured I would use that opportunity to reboot > the alpha in a special satellite mode without a local page file, > allowing me to do an image backup of the main system disk to that > workstation's disk. > > It had been so long since I rebooted a machine that i had to take out > the boom for the magic incantation of the boot command to get it into > sysboot mode. In my opinion planned reboots every 4 months or so is a good thing to keep people and startup scripts uptodate. Consider the famous irish rail system with 17 years of uptime. I assume that it did come up fine, but imagine if it had not. Guy at the console: hey it does not start up properly - has anyone changed anything in the startup scripts ? Group of other guys: since when ? Guy at the console: within the last 17 years ! :-) Arne ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:45:45 -0400 From: "Richard B. Gilbert" Subject: Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Message-ID: <47F05059.2000800@comcast.net> Arne Vajhøj wrote: > JF Mezei wrote: > >> As an indication of reliability, yesterday, for Earth Hour, I decided to >> shutdown one alpha. I figured I would use that opportunity to reboot >> the alpha in a special satellite mode without a local page file, >> allowing me to do an image backup of the main system disk to that >> workstation's disk. >> >> It had been so long since I rebooted a machine that i had to take out >> the boom for the magic incantation of the boot command to get it into >> sysboot mode. > > > In my opinion planned reboots every 4 months or so is a good thing > to keep people and startup scripts uptodate. > > Consider the famous irish rail system with 17 years of uptime. > > I assume that it did come up fine, but imagine if it had not. > > Guy at the console: hey it does not start up properly - has > anyone changed anything in the startup scripts ? > > Group of other guys: since when ? > > Guy at the console: within the last 17 years ! > > :-) > > Arne But if you never restarted it in 17 years, why did you need to modify the startup scripts? And if you are going to keep a cluster running continuosly for 17 years I think you probably should have a test cluster on which you test all changes before putting them in production! ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:48:26 -0700 (PDT) From: ewilts@ewilts.org Subject: Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Message-ID: <2874d28a-3525-4e5c-9198-f0ad1a0cded0@z38g2000hsc.googlegroups.com> On Mar 30, 8:54 pm, Arne Vajh=F8j wrote: > Consider the famous irish rail system with 17 years of uptime. That's *cluster*, not *system*. > I assume that it did come up fine, but imagine if it had not. > > Guy at the console: hey it does not start up properly - has > anyone changed anything in the startup scripts ? > > Group of other guys: since when ? > > Guy at the console: within the last 17 years ! My cluster has been up for nearly 10 years but each node has been rebooted regularly - none of the nodes (nor the storage) in the cluster today were there when the cluster was formed in 1998. Most of the hardware hadn't even been invented yet! There were more Vaxes than Alphas orignally, but there hasn't been a single Vax in the cluster is several years. The OS has seen major upgrades as well as many minor patch updates. The links between data centers went from Gigaswitches to SAN ISLs. One of the data centers has lost power a few times. In all that time, the cluster has continued to serve end user applications. Reliability, Availability, Serviceability. When it comes to Alphas running VMS, pick any 3. .../Ed ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:01:29 -0400 From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= Subject: Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Message-ID: <47f05403$0$90263$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> ewilts@ewilts.org wrote: > On Mar 30, 8:54 pm, Arne Vajhøj wrote: >> Consider the famous irish rail system with 17 years of uptime. > > That's *cluster*, not *system*. Sure ? I always thought it was a single system. Arne ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:05:02 -0400 From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= Subject: Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Message-ID: <47f054da$0$90264$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> Richard B. Gilbert wrote: > Arne Vajhøj wrote: >> JF Mezei wrote: >>> As an indication of reliability, yesterday, for Earth Hour, I decided to >>> shutdown one alpha. I figured I would use that opportunity to reboot >>> the alpha in a special satellite mode without a local page file, >>> allowing me to do an image backup of the main system disk to that >>> workstation's disk. >>> >>> It had been so long since I rebooted a machine that i had to take out >>> the boom for the magic incantation of the boot command to get it into >>> sysboot mode. >> >> >> In my opinion planned reboots every 4 months or so is a good thing >> to keep people and startup scripts uptodate. >> >> Consider the famous irish rail system with 17 years of uptime. >> >> I assume that it did come up fine, but imagine if it had not. >> >> Guy at the console: hey it does not start up properly - has >> anyone changed anything in the startup scripts ? >> >> Group of other guys: since when ? >> >> Guy at the console: within the last 17 years ! > > But if you never restarted it in 17 years, why did you need to modify > the startup scripts? If something was installed that did not require a reboot. > And if you are going to keep a cluster running continuosly for 17 years > I think you probably should have a test cluster on which you test all > changes before putting them in production! Likely. But possibly not or the test system is only used to test apps not OS config or the script did not make for the install kit or ... Arne ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:07:01 -0400 From: "Richard B. Gilbert" Subject: Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Message-ID: <47F05555.7040308@comcast.net> Arne Vajhøj wrote: > ewilts@ewilts.org wrote: > >> On Mar 30, 8:54 pm, Arne Vajhøj wrote: >> >>> Consider the famous irish rail system with 17 years of uptime. >> >> >> That's *cluster*, not *system*. > > > Sure ? > > I always thought it was a single system. > > Arne I think it would take several miracles to keep a single system running for 17 years with no down time!! With a cluster and lots of money for things like emergency generators, dual redundant or N+1 redundant power supplies, dual redundant UPSs, two or more air conditioners (each rated for the full load), etc, etc, it ain't easy but it can be done! ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 04:12:44 +0000 (UTC) From: moroney@world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney) Subject: Re: Alphaserver/station reliability Message-ID: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= writes: >ewilts@ewilts.org wrote: >> On Mar 30, 8:54 pm, Arne Vajhøj wrote: >>> Consider the famous irish rail system with 17 years of uptime. >> >> That's *cluster*, not *system*. >Sure ? >I always thought it was a single system. That was a single system. A VAX 750 if I recall correctly. I have heard from a reliable source that that record has since been broken, but I have no details whatsoever. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:37:44 -0700 From: "Tom Linden" Subject: Re: Does POWER_OFF really work ? Message-ID: On Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:38:23 -0700, VAXman- <@SendSpamHere.ORG> wrote: > In article <47ef152b$0$23915$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com>, JF Mezei > writes: >> Figured I would shut down one of my alphas for EARTH-HOUR . >> {...snip...} > > As you've experienced, it works about as well as Earth Hour did. > And equally significant -- PL/I for OpenVMS www.kednos.com ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:58:23 -0700 (PDT) From: USmeamr Subject: Download Range PC/ MOBILE /PSP [http://www.downloadrange.com] Message-ID: <3874068c-921a-4edb-a423-9597537da6e3@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com> Complete range of downloads for your PC PSP and Mobile Phone, Including free Games, Applications and many more.... PSP VIDEOS FREE E-BOOKS FREE JAVA GAMES FREE WALLPAPERS AND SCREEN SAVERS NOKIA MOTOROLA SONY ERICSSON Only at http://www.downloadrange.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:09:06 GMT From: John Santos Subject: Re: RX3600 and VMS 8.3 Message-ID: Richard B. Gilbert wrote: > John Santos wrote: > >> Jeremy Begg wrote: >> >>> Hi Tom, >>> >>>> On Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:34:53 -0700, Jeremy Begg >>>> wrote: >>>> >>>>> Make sure you install OpenVMS V8.3-1H1 on your Integrity box; >>>>> amongst other things it gives you USB 2.0 so a range of cheap >>>>> storage peripherals become an option. (The hardware of course has >>>>> alwways supported USB 2.0 devices but OpenVMS restricted it to >>>>> low-speed operation.) >>>>> >>>> >>>> Are there any reasonable backup devices that operate over the USB >>>> interface? >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> A number of vendors, including HP, make DAT tape drives with USB 2.0 >>> interfaces. >>> >>> You could also look at Iomega's REV drive, which uses removable disk >>> cartridges of 35GB or 70GB capacity. I've got old one with a >>> Firewire interface here on a Mac and it seems to work quite well. >>> >>> And of course there is a wide choice of external hard drives by >>> Seagate/Maxtor, Western Digital, Hitachi, LaCie, etc. >>> >>> Regards, >>> >>> Jeremy Begg >>> (replace nospam by jeremy to reply via email) >>> >> >> We back up our development cluster (3 Alpha, 1 VAX, 1 Itanium) to >> external USB hard disks. About 20 disks, many quite old and small, >> it all fits easily on a single 300GB(?) disk. I think we have >> about 3 of them we cycle through. It isn't particularly fast, but >> we run incrementals overnight, and image backups occasionally on >> weekends, so time doesn't matter much. (Since it is a development >> cluster, not production, we don't worry too much about about online >> backups! See other thread!) >> >> We have system disk backups on 8mm (Alpha server 1200), DAT (Alpha >> 3000-300) and TK70(!) (VAX 4000-200), so we can recover if all >> else fails. > > > > Have you tested restoring from 8mm? 8mm may have improved since I last > used it but my experience was that it was unreliable even with so called > "data grade" tapes. YMMV! > Yes. 8mm is our 3rd level backup. (There are also backups to NFS on a Sun that are then backed up to DLT.) But it used to be our primary backup and we were able to restore images from them on several occasions, and more often retrieved individual files and directories. The drives have been pretty unreliable... We've probably been through about 5 or 6 of them over the years. But we've always been able to restore when we had to. -- John Santos Evans Griffiths & Hart, Inc. 781-861-0670 ext 539 ------------------------------ End of INFO-VAX 2008.181 ************************