[Info-vax] Current VMS engineering quality, was: Re: What's VMS up to these

[Paul Sture]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2012 05:19:22 +0100, Michael Kraemer wrote:

> Paul Sture schrieb:
> 
>> There were a couple of other problems here.  When twenty odd
>> workstations were trying to reboot, when the network came back they all
>> did it more or less at once.
> 
> Yep, rather messy.
> Plus, when the network still had persistent/intermittent problems, the
> whole configuration remained dead in the water.

We didn't usually have such a long outage.  Sometimes it hit the PCs 
rather than the VMS systems, and in these cases we could carry on 
working, but the PC only folks were out of luck.  With a bit of luck, you 
could save any work in progress to your local PC disk, but that was not
always the case.

>> Until I changed the workstations to use Dump Off System Disk (DOSD),
>> the server system disk would go into a full shadow merge (or was it
>> shadow copy?).  This caused further problems:
>> 
>> a) the boot times were exceptionally long b) some part of DECnet Phase
>> V could time out and you'd have to reboot the workstation later to
>> recover from this
> 
> I don't know if this would have helped in the cases I experienced. But
> I'm rather sure the responsible VMS experts would have tried it, if
> possible. Too embarrassing, a VMS cluster unavailable for hours.

It definitely helped us, but ISTR having more than one go at 
implementing DOSD.  I finally acquired some definitive instructions
amd those worked fine.  I was the only one on our team to think about
this solution, so maybe there were many other system managers out there
who didn't know about it.

Prior to getting DOSD working we would drop the system disk non-master
shadow set until the whole cluster was up.  Not an ideal workaround but
it did the job.

-- 
Paul Sture