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From: doug@marque.UUCP (harris)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.att
Subject: AT&T service for 3B5s
Message-ID: <1712@marque.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 24-Jun-87 12:58:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: marque.1712
Posted: Wed Jun 24 12:58:50 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Jun-87 05:51:08 EDT
Reply-To: doug@marque.UUCP (harris, douglas)
Distribution: na
Organization: Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI
Lines: 30

We have AT&T 3B5s as the main machines for our department; one has
been in place for almost 3 years, and two have been in place for
about a year and a half.  All are under maintenance by AT&T.
Unfortunately for the past year two of them have been subject
to frequent crashes, which result in a flurry of board-swapping
by the local maintenance folks, or replacement of disks and so on.
The problems usually recur a month or so later.

There have been a variety of reorganizations of the maintenance by
AT&T and the hotline, but all continue to exhibit the characteristics
above.

My question is: what kind of experience do other folks have?
Is there something we can do locally (other than lean on AT&T)
do improve this situation?  Are there organizations other than
AT&T to which we can turn?

The local AT&T folks, and the hotline folks, appear to try very hard
to improve matters, but to no avail.  They so far have never tried
any crash dump analysis, to diagnose the cause of the problems, or at
least try to.  Is it normal that this is not done?  Should we be
receiving some sort of explanation after the crash, other than
"we replaced board X".

We (want to) like our AT&T hardware very much; it was certainly
very reliable for a while.  But we need suggestions as to what we
can do, other than rely upon AT&T to live up to their agreements.
Doug Harris,
...!uwvax!marque!doug
dougbass,ss