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From: brian@prism.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.pyramid
Subject: Re: 90x upgrades
Message-ID: <232400002@prism>
Date: Fri, 13-Nov-87 18:54:00 EST
Article-I.D.: prism.232400002
Posted: Fri Nov 13 18:54:00 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Nov-87 11:16:19 EST
References: <516@udiego.UUCP>
Lines: 51
Nf-ID: #R:udiego.UUCP:-51600:prism:232400002:000:2063
Nf-From: prism.UUCP!brian    Nov 13 18:54:00 1987



We have a 9820 and a 98x in house right now -- here is "the tale of two
upgrades" as well as I can remember it...


1) we started out with a 90x and a 98x. To get a 9820, we were going to 
get rid of the 90, and upgrade everything to OSx4.0 (we were running 3.1).

2) The software upgrade to OSx4.0 revealed the following:
    NFS was broken for a while, probably because of other problems.
    portmap was broken for a LONG while -- it would just die for no reason.
    After 4 (or was it 5?) PTF's, we had a system that stayed up for longer
    than minutes.

    the select() call for sockets was broken, and caused kernel crashes.
    It has since been fixed. The behavior of flock() when used with LOCK_EX
     or'd with LOCK_SH is different from that of Berkeley unix.
   
    bc is broken (and still is) -- try e(1), e(0), e(2)....
 
3) I spent a 70 hour week, and a 93 hour week doing the upgrade. It was only
   supposed to take 4 hours.  The pyramid FE (software) in NE was diligent 
   enough to survive some of the all-nighters required.

   
4) We had some flakey hardware as well. We've been through a couple of 
   I-Units, a cache or two, and IOP/TPE controllers.  Our IOP/TPE still 
   crashes occasionally. The maximum uptime so far has been about 5 days.
   Our IOP (root disk controller) crashes enough to irritate, but not
   enough to call service. 

Beware "kernel mode page faults".  I think some of the berk socket machinery
still needs oil... (also, another site had some complaints about the x.25 
support...).


I'd like to hear from others who have done the upgrade as well, and if there
have been problems like these.

----
Brian K. Moran --  brian@mirror.TMC.COM	
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