[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[Jay E. Morris]

On 1/28/2013 1:36 PM, David Froble wrote:
> Jay E. Morris wrote:
>> On 1/28/2013 9:18 AM, Bob Koehler wrote:
>>> In article
>>> <e080d945-0523-4e37-a5cf-2abb7c76090f at y5g2000pbi.googlegroups.com>,
>>> AEF <spamsink2001 at yahoo.com> writes:
>>>>
>>>> At one job I interviewed at in the late 90's they rebooted the VAX
>>>> every day!
>>>
>>>     We had an installation that we were putting small VAXen into that
>>>     had grown up around IBM mainframes.  Our people had changed the
>>>     mainframe from never rebooting, to rebooting once a week "just to
>>>     clean things up".  Seemed to work.
>>>
>>>     We just looked at our IBM experts like they were lost in the past.
>>>     Mostly the VAXen rebooted after power loss (couldn't justify an
>>> UPS).
>>>
>>>     Had another site where some of the VAXen had two completely
>>> different
>>>     environments, major differences in SYSGEN parameters and sometimes
>>>     differences in OS versions.  Stored each on removable disk packs and
>>>     rebooted at least twice a day to switch between environments.
>>>
>>
>> We had an engineer on site from ...whoever did Mumps... about some
>> upgrades.  At one point she asked me when was the last time I'd
>> rebooted the Alphas.  When I told her over two years she said that I
>> needed to reboot them at least weekly.
>
> Probably the best course was to ask her "Why?" and the justifications.

Actually the programmer she was working with did ask her.  Because a 
system manager she once worked with did that.  From what I could glean 
something was screwed up in some 7/24 production system* so instead of 
getting management to agree to taking it off-line long enough to 
actually find and fix the problem he rebooted the system every few days.

*She said it was to reset something or other.  She had no idea what and 
just thought that it was normal.

>
>> I told her that what we really needed was to be in a three story
>> building instead of just one.
>>
>> Huh?
>>
>> So I can throw you out a window.
>>
>> We didn't get along well after that.
>
> But yeah, I know that feeling ....
>
> :-)