[Info-vax] HSZ console drops to NINDY...

[Paul Sture]

On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:23:35 +0000, VAXman- wrote:

> In article <tkjcp8-u931.ln1 at news.sture.ch>, Paul Sture
> <paul.nospam at sture.ch> writes:
>>On Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:41:29 +0000, VAXman- wrote:
>>
>>> Well, FWIW, the HSZ will still not maintain the time after I set it.
>>> I'll SET THIS/OTHER TIME=dd-mmm-yyyy:hh:mm:ss and then, if I issue a
>>> SHUTDOWN THIS/OTHER and restart it, it comes up with TIME NOT SET.   
>>> I thought that the CR2032 was backing that up but apparently not.
>>
>>I assume the battery is OK?  HSJs and HSZs can happily go wrong if the
>>battery is on the way out.
> 
> This is what precipitated this whole discussion -- the replacement of
> the CR2032.
> 
> It was a brand new battery tested on both a battery tester and my
> Wavetek 27XT.

The catastrophe we had with this was due to what should have been a 
routine bit of server room work.  Typical scenario: shut down servers on 
Friday night, let the electricians / air con / network people loose on 
Saturday, restart servers on Sunday (and maybe replace the odd disk which 
didn't come back - we had a lot of disks).

Having the power off for so long meant that one of the HSJ batteries was 
completely dead by the time power came back.  Since I wasn't in 
attendance that time, I'm not familiar with the precise details of what 
happened, but the upshot was that disks connected to that controller got 
corrupted.

Yeah, we had backups, but disk corruption really should not have 
happened, and I believe DEC/Compaq received some high level flack about 
this.

It raised the question of "how old is a battery?" in the context of field 
service replacements.

I know have some piece of consumer kit here where when replacing a 
battery you are supposed to insert the new one within something like a 
couple of minutes of power off if you want to save the device settings...


-- 
Paul Sture

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to
determine whether or not they are genuine."     -- Abraham Lincoln