micro-code upgrade (and VMS vs. Unix stats)

[Roy Smith]

dodgson at cs.wmich.edu (Harry Dodgson) writes:
> The DEC rep will be in this Tuesday to upgrade the microcode to
> level 103.  He doesn't know anything about Unix.

	Some number of years ago, when our 750 was fairly new, DEC came out
with a "rev 7" upgrade, which was some minor change in the memory controller
having to do with catching cache parity errors, or something like that (I
don't remember exactly, but the details are not that important).  DEC
insisted on installing it on our 750 and I foolishly let them.

	The result was weeks (or was it months?) of agony.  It never worked
right and DEC insisted on putting the blame on the fact that we were running
Unix.  Eventually, after GOK how many board swaps, they got us a board that
worked, claiming that they were special-testing boards to find ones that ran
under Unix.  When I say I "foolishly" let them install it, what I mean is
that until they did the upgrade, we didn't have any problems; we never had
the symptoms that the upgrade was supposed to cure and after the upgrade we
had *lots* of problems.

	My advice is to ask DEC just *why* they want to install the new
microcode, and don't let them unless they have a damn good reason.  If your
machine works as it is, what do you have to gain by changing something?

heins at atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (Leeland Heins) writes:
> ** opinion on :-) **  Does any DEC rep ever say anything but "buy VMS"?  :-)

	I saw an interesting statistic in (of all places) MacWEEK (21 March
1989, page 60).  They did a (somewhat silly) survey of Macs connected to
bigger machines at 269 "very large Macintosh sites".  They found that of
Vaxen with "connected" Macs, 54% run only Ultrix (which I take to mean Unix
of various flavors), 37% run a mix of Ultrix and VMS, and only 1% run
strictly VMS.  They didn't mention if these were academic or commercial
sites.  I hope this doesn't start another VMS vs. Unix war.
-- 
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy at phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"