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| Author |
Message |
clb
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ram
| 
Jul 18 05:16 UTC 1995 |
when will grex get its ram card
installed?
the system isn't really running very
stable!
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| 16 responses total. |
popcorn
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response 1 of 16:
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Jul 18 11:51 UTC 1995 |
Hm. To me the system looks a lot *more* stable than it did when the
RAM card was bad. It's been *up* the last several times I've tried
to log in, and I haven't had to reboot it in days and days.
I'm not sure we have another RAM card available to install right away.
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steve
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response 2 of 16:
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Jul 18 19:01 UTC 1995 |
We're running with 96M of ram at the moment, so I don't think we're
doing too badly. It does seem that many of the last reboots were caused
by this card, so we're better off without it. I've sent some queries out
as to what 32M cards cost these days.
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danr
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response 3 of 16:
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Jul 19 10:57 UTC 1995 |
Any chance this board could be repaired? Or would the cost be too much?
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srw
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response 4 of 16:
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Jul 20 02:42 UTC 1995 |
I believe there is some small chance that a resident hardware guru
might be able to identify the faulty component and replace it, but
the chance is kind of small, I think, because of the intermittent
nature of the failure
From What I've heard there are Sun hardware repair places, but it
is not clear what the expense of this kind of repair would be.
I expect the hardware staffers (not me) will be investigating these
options. Fortunately, it doesn't appear to any kind of emergency.
The system is much more stable now on 96M ram than it was last week.
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steve
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response 5 of 16:
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Jul 20 03:26 UTC 1995 |
We know of a couple of people on the west coast who might be
able to help out, either by mentioning a common failure of these
boards, or (less likely) being able and willing to repair it for
a fee.
But at $300 (and falling) for one of them, I think we're probably
going to find out that it isn't worth the repair. I think I've seen
a few more of these cards going for $285 in the recent past (wish I'd
saved that article I was glancing at).
Overall, we've had a *fantastic* record on our hardware, in terms
of flaky things developing. That I know of, this is the first time
we have had an actually used piece of hardware die on us, on either
the Sun-2 or Sun-3 platforms. So we're doing pretty darned well,
considering that Grex has taken several power hits in recent weeks,
and that this board might be OK, except that it can't deal with
really high temperature problems. If the latter is the case, we
*might* (but no promises here) be able to use it in the future when
we get better/more airflow in the Dungeon.
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mju
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response 6 of 16:
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Jul 20 17:21 UTC 1995 |
I'm not sure that it's worthwhile to repair/replace this board. I don't
notice the system much slower now than it was on 128MB, although it would
probably be a good idea to actually look at vmstat output, etc. to see how
much VM we typically use. It might be better to just "limp along" on 96MB
until we upgrade to a faster SPARC CPU (Sun-4/660 or maybe one of the desktop
SPARC systems), and then put the money into memory for that machine, which
will probably be SIMMs rather than a proprietary Sun VME memory board.
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gregc
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response 7 of 16:
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Jul 20 18:46 UTC 1995 |
Well, one thing to realize, is that one of those boards actually belongs to
Marcus, and he will be needing it back at some point in the future to get
his Sun-3(4) working. So Grex currently only owns 64meg of working memory.
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steve
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response 8 of 16:
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Jul 21 19:39 UTC 1995 |
Right. And, the SPARC needs more memory than the 020 does for
an equivelant set of jobs; thats what I remember when Bio-Image
was just starting to switch over to Sun-4's. So we definately need
to pick up at least one board, and maybe two if their cheap enough.
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sidhe
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response 9 of 16:
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Jul 29 19:39 UTC 1995 |
Why repair/replace anything on this system, if the time would be better
spent on the Sun4?
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srw
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response 10 of 16:
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Jul 30 06:35 UTC 1995 |
Memory from the Sun-3 carries over to the Sun-4.
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sidhe
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response 11 of 16:
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Jul 31 22:11 UTC 1995 |
And a good answer is had!
I apologize, I was under the impression that it wasn't.
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srw
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response 12 of 16:
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Aug 1 06:22 UTC 1995 |
Well. It won't carry over to the next generation of Sparc *after* the Sun-4.
Machines such as SparcStations use SIMM memory, so the lifetime of our
memory is not infinite. However, we need to plan only one system upgrade
at a time.
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ajax
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response 13 of 16:
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Aug 2 17:11 UTC 1995 |
Though "SIMM" isn't an infinitely useful standard, either. The
next step up from the Sun 4/2xx will take 30-pin SIMMs, which is
also becoming outdated (72-pin is common in new systems, and 168-
pin SIMMs look like the next common standard).
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srw
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response 14 of 16:
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Aug 3 05:19 UTC 1995 |
True, I was only using the term SIMM to distinguish it from what we have
purchased. Each of the different sizes, 30pin, 72pin, and 168pin, represent
a widening of the path to memory.
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steve
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response 15 of 16:
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Aug 4 12:26 UTC 1995 |
Soon we shall have as many different types of SIMMs as there are
flowers. Ugh. ;-)
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gregc
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response 16 of 16:
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Aug 4 18:44 UTC 1995 |
"Where have all the SIMM packs gone? Long time passing......"
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