Aucbvax.6013
fa.info-vax
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax
Sun Jan 31 12:36:13 1982
RDC and Unix
>From mo@LBL-UNIX Sun Jan 31 12:33:09 1982
RDC works just fine with Unix. When you get RDC installed, you get a
special set of floppies that work with RDC (that don't have anything to
do with Unix). When your hardware breaks, you do the RDC incantation
and then hang around to change floppies for the person on the other
end. Note that RDC can supply both Hardware and Software diagnosis for
DEC products. This rules-out RDC fixing your Unix kernel, but they
seem to be somewhat knowledgeable of what is happening. I personally
don't have anything DEC on my machine but the CPU, one board of memory,
and one MBA with nothing attached, a DZ11-E, and a DN11, so they really
just run the micros from long-distance, but on our other two VMS
machines, they do diagnose other hardware problems. HOWEVER, I have
never seen them diagnose a serious problem with VMS still running.
They look at the error log and then take the system down. If anything
is broken very badly, it usually pollutes the bus, or causes interrupts
to wild locations, or other bad things. VMS is very intolerant of this
behavior, as is Unix to some degree, so fixing hardware really can't be
done with the production system up. All this means that the operating
system doesn't really effect RDC operations if you are willing to read
them the console error messages over the phone, or type them in in
"link" mode. I will mention that the Unix trick of cracking the CSR's
into the actual bit nmemonics was a big hit when I told them about it.
-Mike
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