[Info-vax] Used DS-10 or equivalent recommendations?

[Tom Adams]

On Saturday, October 8, 2016 at 8:58:00 AM UTC-4, MG wrote:
> Op 7-okt-2016 om 15:34 schreef John E. Malmberg:
> > After a power failure here longer than the UPS, my DS-10 is no longer
> > functioning.
> >
> > No Beep tone diagnostics.
> >
> > No video.
> >
> > No POST activity for keyboard lights.
> >
> > Disk activity lights solid.
> >
> > So it looks like I need a replacement system.
> >
> > Any recommendations on getting a replacement that I can just move my
> > memory, disks, and PCI cards over to?
> >
> > The islandco website appears down, so can not look there.
> >
> > I see a number of systems on e-bay at various prices.
> 
> For some reason, or maybe I was unlucky, too, DS10s (or their
> PSUs) appear to be prone to electrical issues, especially
> after power failures.
> 
> I remember one of my DS10s had worked fine but from some time
> onward, after one or more power failures, it began to exhibit
> unpredictable behavior.  It would power up, run, etc., but I
> would get bizarre errors under VMS, with no explanation for
> it in the logs.  The kind of errors you may also expect from
> memory faults, but I swapped the memory (and also the disk)
> between my DS10s and the problems were really specific to
> one DS10.
> 
> My conclusion was at the time that perhaps the PSU wasn't in
> order and, just like now, they're relatively hard to come by,
> not to mention quite costly.
> 
> Reparing a PSU can be quite dangerous and one has to be
> careful, but that hopefully goes without saying.
> 
>   - MG

We put our DS10s on UPSes strictly for hardware preservation. We had power supply and mother board failures due to power failures.

But this does tend to shift the power supply failures to your next power down, or at least it seems so.