Mindless ramblings & will this make it to the net...

[Craig Votava]

Hi folks, this is my umteen-millionth try at posting something to the net.
We're having BIG problems here with connections to the net, on top of all
of the political garbage that's going on.

I'm still trying to repost the upgrades that I promised everyone in January.
If this technique works, I'll give it another try; if they've already made
it to the net, someone let me know (they have the word REPOST as the last word
in the title and there were 6 of them).

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IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP FOR UNIX-PC OWNERS-IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP FOR UNIX-PC OWNERS
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Recently, I noticed that my [ws]mgr process was dying (the one that keeps the
time up on the top line, and that runs cron) but I dismissed it as some simple
problem and started it up again by hand. Then while working on my machine, I
heard the disk power down (stop spinning) for no reason. The rest of the
machine was up and running fine. After a few seconds, the drive came back and
the system continued normally (except for the [ws]mgr which had died).

This worried me, and I had my machine down all last week trying to locate the
problem. Well, I found it! It was the crimp connector on the ribbon cable at
the power supply board, that supplies power the motherboard. Apparently, the
more I plugged and un-plugged this connector while working on the machine, the
looser the connections became. When I finally noticed the connector, I saw that
one of the wires had worked loose from the crimp clamp.

What I did to fix it was to go through with needle-nose pliers, and re-clamped
each one of the wires for the entire ribbon cable. After that I let my machine
run over the weekend with no problems! Even the display seems to be a little
more stable over power surges. I'm thinking about soldering all the wires at
some point in time, just to make sure this doesn't happen again, but I thought
it would be a good warning to post to the net in case similar problems like
this have occurred.
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IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP FOR UNIX-PC OWNERS-IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP FOR UNIX-PC OWNERS
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My latest challenge is to connect a streamer tape in parrellel to the floppy
disk cable, and write a driver to select it instead of the floppy. After
spending many hours trying to decipher the hardware setup, and guessing how
the driver works, I've come to the (possibly naive) conclusion that it is
possible. It is possible only due to chance, in the way they've defined the
floppy/hard disk control register. The streamer tape I'm testing this out with
is the "stock" drive you get when you buy the $1500.00 tape backup stuff from
AT&T (the drive is from CYPHER 20some-odd Megabytes) there are larger capacity
streamer tapes available (60-120 Meg @ ~$400.00) that can possibly work with
this setup also, but I want to try and get the CYPHER working first. I'll be
sure to keep everyone posted as to the outcome of this project.

While doing research on the above problem, I talked to a friend of mine who
told me that Convergent did have an unsupported, internal hardware upgrade
for the motherboard that would allow you to have 2 (and only 2) physical hard
disks connected to the machine. Then, when I was reading through the circuit
descriptions for the hard disk, I realized how this could be done! I believe
it's basically the same as the access-more-than-8-heads upgrade with minor
variations. It has to do with the way the bits are defined in the floppy/hard
disk control register. I'm not too interested in following this one up, but
if there's someone out there who is, drop me a note and I'll give you my ideas
on the topic.

Well that's enough for now, maybe I'll post more ramblings later on. I
apologize to a couple folks that sent me mail that I haven't returned yet,
but with the old job, new job, and everything else, I've been kinda busy.
Hang in there, or send me a reminder, and I'll get something out for you.

Craig Votava
[ihnp4!]ihlpm!cmv

P.S. Gary S., please let me know if this shows up on your machine via netnews!