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)