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

[Keith Parris]

On 3/15/2012 9:47 PM, Michael Kraemer wrote:
> On these occasions, when VMS went down, the network was still "up",
> but loaded with crap. It was no fun to work with Unix either,
> but with some patience, it was possible.

One day at the site where I was working at the time a loop apparently 
developed in the IP network due to some sort of misconfiguration related 
to bridging (lack of Spanning Tree or some such). There was a flood of 
packets. None of the systems could communicate over IP, but LAT and 
DECnet and OpenVMS Cluster communications continued uninterrupted.

When the tsunami of garbage packets hit the VMS systems, the DEC chip 
(Tulip) based Ethernet adapters (i.e. DE500 series) kept going, but the 
Intel chip based (DE600) Ethernet adapters all locked up tight (this bug 
was fixed a few months later with a firmware revision).