[Info-vax] What video card for a DS10?

[Kari Uusimäki]

Tom Adams wrote:
> On Oct 9, 8:19 am, Tom Adams <tadams... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Oct 8, 3:29 pm, Steven Schweda <sms.antin... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> tadamsmar wrote:
>>>> I have some DS10s to maintain.  I think one of them has a bad video
>>>> card.  The monitor is getting no input as if it was not plugged into
>>>> the connector.  I swapped and checked the monitor, so I know the
>>>> problem is not the monitor.
>>>> The system is still up and in use.  When I can (tomorrow perhaps) I
>>>> will be able to shut it down and swap the video card as a test.
>>>    I'd reboot the thing once before touching the guts.
>> Will reboot.
> 
> Rebooting (or power cycling, at least) worked!
> 
> I tried the reboot button, but it did not seem to be rebooting. I
> could
> not see the reboot in progress, and there was no clock handy so
> maybe I got impatient.  Anyway, I cycled the power.
> 
> I had a tense few minutes afraid the thing would not restart, trying
> to decide if I had to do an emergency recover on a different DS10.
> I went looking for the researchers that might use it that that day,
> to warn them of a possible delay.
> 
> I met one at the elevator with a bucket of cells on ice, obviously
> heading to use the system.   I was telling her there might be
> a problem as we walked into the room.  I saw that the watchdog
> light was off indicating that the system was up.  She walked right
> over and used the computer console monitor that previously was
> not working to log in and set up her experiment.
> 
> Whew!
> 
>> Is there any way to do a orderly shutdown without the monitor?
>>
>> How can I switch over to monitoring via the serial port?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>    Which card is in there now?
>>>> What video cards can I use?   Can I buy a new one or do I need a
>>>> legacy card?
>>>    Define "new".  Define "legacy".  I use Radeon 7500 cards in
>>> my XP1000 systems.  I believe that the same is true for my
>>> rx2600 and zx2000 IA64 systems, too, but I usually access
>>> those over the network or on a serial port.  I'd guess that an
>>> ELSA GLoria Synergy-8 (PowerStorm 4D10T, PBXGK-BB) . (The
>>> "ViVo" card works, too.  Just ignore the extra holes.)
>>>    I got my cards on Ebay for probably about $10-$20, but I
>>> haven't looked lately.
>>>    I assume that you weren't expecting an obsolete VMS version
>>> in an obsolete Alpha system to support some card made last
>>> year, intended to be used in Windows PC.- Hide quoted text -
>> - Show quoted text -
> 


Now when everything is working again, you could shut down VMS and check 
from the console which card you have in case there will be a problem 
with it later on. Doing
 >>> show config

you'll see the card type on the display.

Another thing to recommend is to define the console to the serial port
 >>> set console serial

It is a lot easier and more accurate to do troubleshooting through the 
serial port than using the graphical console. And you can restart 
DECwindows and reboot throught the serial port if DECwindows or the 
graphics card is frozen.

One more way to do a reboot remotely is to connect to the workstation using
$ SET HOST /LAT <machinename>
and login normally and then reboot. Since LAT is a very low level 
protocol, you'll have the connection active until VMS is really down.
Then you can connect again after a few minutes, when LAT has started.

Then one more note; I have some Elsa Gloria cards which I can part from 
for free and then we have at work some Oxygen VX1's for sale.


Kari