Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!RICHTER.MIT.EDU!krowitz From: krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: NLS servers Message-ID: <8812061713.AA00255@richter.mit.edu> Date: 6 Dec 88 17:13:33 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 37 Actually, between crashes due to bugs in Domain/OS, servers getting wedged and refusing to die when SIGP'ed, GPIO/DMA bugs causing illegal page faults, and users filling up all of the disk space and crashing the node, our machines have unscheduled downtime at least once a month, not including hardware problems (which, as you've pointed out are not too much of a problem on the newer machines). It generally takes half a day for a repairman to reach our site after we call in a problem, and we are only half an hour from our field service office in Framingham (and only 45 minutes from Chelmsford). If a problem occurs in the evening, it takes 12 to 16 hours to get someone on site. That's an awfully long period to be without our software licences. It's bad enough when we lose a node/disk just prior to a major scientific conference, but I can always grab the backup tapes and restore files to another disk. If we were to lose our network wide software licenses on, for instance, the night before the American Geophysical Union is to start, and it took 12 to 16 hours to get them back, I'd lose my job. Our Ricoh copier broke (again) last week. It took them a day to get here. The AGU meeting started this Monday. Ricoh will not get our business in the future. I think Apollo needs to take a second look at having the licenses node locked. If Apollo can find no alternative, then they should supply instructions and tools for moving the node ID prom in an emergency. One alternative which comes to mind is something someone came up with for the PC market -- a module which plugged into an RS232 port and served as a software license for the machine. It allowed PC users to move their software from machine to machine, have multiple copies for backup purposes, and still only have a single usable software license. -- David Krowitz krowitz@richter.mit.edu (18.83.0.109) krowitz%richter@eddie.mit.edu krowitz%richter@athena.mit.edu krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet (in order of decreasing preference)