[HECnet] DS10 memory

[Mark Wickens]

I have a DS10L, so can check for anything you need to know. I ran my DS10L with an IDE disk for ages and didn't really notice much in the way of performance issues, but then I rarely use computers to the point where it starts becoming an issue. Since then I've installed a SCSI card (and consequently removed the ATI7500 PCI graphics card) and a 68-pin 146GB drive. I could do with that drive in a SBB in SLAVE, but as it's 68 pin and not SCA I'm out of luck. Will have to pick one up off ebay (I noticed that what I thought was the complete DECUS archive on SLAVE:: is in fact only a subset. The full archive is 70GB, so I need to increase capacity from the current 36GB drive)

I've been having my own fun today - pulled the ZX6000 out of the basement to have a go at installing Debian 6.0.2.1. The previous problem (not recognising the DVD-ROM drive after boot, somewhat serious) has been replaced with a different problem at the end of installation where the tool to install the EFI boot files won't find the EFI boot partition, which is a small FAT partition created at the start of the disk. The partition is there - a google search shows one other person with a similar issue.

The OpenVMS installation also needs attention - it wouldn't start up CDE. I had a play with HP/UX and did manage to configure that to start CDE at the end of booting, and indeed have just configured it up to use the ACER 24" 1920x1080 panel. Sometime before I last went to sleep I must have installed a load of software - including Firefox. Weird running firefox on the ZX6000. Seems to work OK however (using it now to access gmail).

I plugged my area router, SLAVE (4.254) into a switch hanging off which was my laptop with 3G dongle and Johnnys bridge, it connected up with my wrapped bridge on my ADSL connection. The wrapper successfully detected an IP address change at the 3G end and SIGHUP'ed the bridge program, which pulled in the new IP address. A delay of about 5 minutes is to be expected, but it worked very nicely!

The ZX6000 initially reported an unrecoverable problem with DRAM slots 2A/2B - I couldn't get it to boot so was forced to pull the RAM, taking it from 16GB to 12GB. I cleaned the contacts and tried reseating the RAM to noavail. I ran the box for a while (the ZX6000 always gets toasy warm, good as a room heater in winter) then swapped the RAM in slots 0A/0B into 2A/2B and inserted the two pulled RAM modules into 0A/0B. Booted fine no problems. I have fun with the memory in this machine before - apparently they are very picky about modules and configuration. Presumably also temperature, time of day, season of year etc. Not exactly confidence inspiring in an 'enterprise' system.

Anyway, at least for the moment, no harm done.

Mark.