Questions about Pyramid/Sequent

[Stephen M. Carter]

In article <KARL.89Mar25181226 at giza.cis.ohio-state.edu> karl at giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes:
>csg at pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes:
>   Anybody want to voice their thoughts on this one? I make the silly things,
>   so I don't know what most people are interested it.
>

At Rutgers, we have about 5 Pyramids of various vintage.  For the research
department I am with, we have a 9810 with a 90x running standby duty.  The
9810 is used mostly for publications/email and your various small jobs while
parallel machines, image grinders, or Suns do the specific work.  

For what we use it for, we could not have made a better choice.  It makes a
great general purpose Unix box.  We average about 20 users at a time, and
on a good day, I haven't seen vmstat show more than 60% cpu usage.  

Hmm, if I had to pick two items off the top, I'd say that the Pyramid gets
gold stars in:
	- I/O.  With the IOP/TPE hardware, io is good.  I am sure there are
better cpu bang/buck machines out there (ie Sun-4), but if you need io power, 
Pyramid does well.
	-Hardware.  Our 9810 just doesn't die (knock on simulated woodgrain).
In the past 14 months, our two service calls were for the Wyse console.

On the down side:
I have seen nowhere in any Pyramid documentation any pointers to hardware 
documentation, configuration manuals, etc.   The nice thing about Sun is
that they are very open about hardware, and include basic configuration 
manuals, hardware documentation and the like with every product.  My 
impression  on Pyramid is that they rather hide this information from 
"us poor users".   Am I right, or am I missing the order code for the
service manuals someplace?   There must be a better way than reverse
enginering a dip switch to compute the address of a board.


Now, for the Pyr folks, two questions:

1) We have a late model Fujitsu MC2444AC tape drive on a 9810 TPE.  Tar,dump,
and the rest all work fine.  However, it will not boot a mini-root from
tape.  I've tried the release tapes from 3.something, 4.0, and 4.4.  Does
the drive (third-party, self installed) need special setup settings?  It
spins the tape of load point and the bar says <booted>.  Hit the Z, and
the tape spins for a few more seconds, and then the machine checkstops.

2) Like I said above, about the only time our 9810 gets rebooted is after
a power failure.  Otherwise, it stays up for 60-70 days at a time.  Should
a machine be rebooted after NN days to prevent software rot?

Stephen Carter
Rutgers-CAIP Center
PO Box 1390, Piscataway NJ 08855-1390
scarter at caip.rutgers.edu