Need Recommendations On 386/486 UNIX systems

[Bill Vermillion]

In article <1990Dec23.162033.3287 at virtech.uucp> cpcahil at virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
>In article <358 at metran.UUCP> jay at metran.UUCP (Jay Ts) writes:
>>One of my clients suffered a direct lightning strike to their building this
 
>From my experience this is a very rare occurence (not lightning striking, but
>lightning strikes causing damage to serial port cards). 
 
>>Arnet reports that 70% of their cards were returned due to surges on the
>>serial lines.

Gawd - I hope they meant 70% of the returned cards were due to surges ...
That I can understand, but having 70% of the cards returned ... ?


>The other way to look at it is that maybe the arnet boards are soo bad
>that the blow apart form the smallest voltage spike or short.
 
>Don't take me wrong.  I'm not saying how good or bad the arnet cards are. 
>I'm only saying that lightning is not a major concern for day to day 
>operations of a "normal" system (of course if the system must have 100%
>uptime even in the worst set of conditions AND the client is willing
>to pay the price,  you can use the extra money to provide lightning
>arrestors).


Lighting does strange things at times.  I had a system that appeared to
take some sort of surge about 3 months ago.   One of the surge surpressors
on a terminal even showed evidence of smoke at the ac connection.

Three Wyse 60's had some problem, one of which would receive but not
transmit.      

We had an Anvil Onboard, and the diagnostics showed that I 3 ports out of 8
that were not testing properly.  Some had handshake problems, others showed
data line problems.   Anvil said send out the board.  They returned it with
NO PROBLEMS FOUND.   Tested again - same problem.

This time they found asked to return the connector panel.  All it has is
two cables, pin connectors on each cable, and a pwa going to 12 db 25s.
This panel was the FIRST panel failure they ever had.  While all the serial
ports themselves were okay.

Lightning is fickle.  It is non-predictable, and never appears to do the
same things twice (except hit twice in the same place!).

bill


-- 
Bill Vermillion - UUCP: uunet!tarpit!bilver!bill
                      : bill at bilver.UUCP