[HECnet] A2RTR downtime

[Thomas DeBellis]

Funny you should send this; I had just been thinking about a few things:

*First*, when you bring everything back online, this is what I am 
currently seeing:

@i dec
  Local DECNET node: TOMMYT.  Nodes reachable: 15.
  Accessible DECNET nodes are:   A2RTR   APOLLO  BOINGO  DOGPAK ELITE   
GLDRTR  GRUNT
  HUNTER HUSKY   JACKAL  ODST    OSIRIS  THEPIT  TOMMYT  VENTI2

NCP>shoW acTIVE nODES
NCP>
14:48:02     NCP

Request # 1449; Show Active Nodes Summary Completed

       Node       State       Active  Delay Circuit       Next node
                              links
   2.291          Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.292 (OSIRIS) Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.293 (ODST)   Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.294 (HUNTER) Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.295 (JACKAL) Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.296 (ELITE)  Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.297 (GRUNT)  Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.299 (THEPIT) Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.399 (BOINGO) Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.400 (APOLLO) Reachable      0       1   NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.520 (TOMMYT) On 0
   Identification = Tommy Timesharing
   2.522 (VENTI2) Reachable      0       1 NI-0-0       2.522 (VENTI2)
   2.609 (HUSKY)  Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.622 (DOGPAK) Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
   2.699 (GLDRTR) Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)
  2.1023 (A2RTR)  Reachable                  NI-0-0 2.1023 (A2RTR)

*Second* is VENTI; I had wanted to test something on it and it doesn't 
appear to be online.

*Third* is the DECnet-10 COM911 drop dead date of November 9^th is now 
about three weeks away (23 days).  This will crash VENTI if it is up and 
force you to enter a bogus date and hope it's not pulling the right date 
from anything.  That can happen on a KL, but I don't know about a KS.

I posted a patch to work around the issue and make Tops-10 act like 
OpenVMS in this regard on December 28^th of last year.  Had you had any 
interest in trying it?

In D36COM.MAC at NMXTIM+9,  change the following two lines (which skip 
or fall into the COM911 BUGHLT),

         SKIPL T2                ;MAKE SURE WE HAVE A POSITIVE NUMBER OF 
SECONDS
         TDNE T1,[XWD -1,600000] ;MAKE SURE NO DATE OVERFLOW

to

         SKIPGE T2               ;Do WE HAVE A POSITIVE NUMBER OF SECONDS?
          MOVMS T2               ; No.  Fine, now we're plenty positive
         TDZA T1,[XWD -1,600000] ;MAKE SURE never any DATE OVERFLOW ever

*Fourth* (and final) concerns RAID in an indirect way.  My Tops-20 
systems are backed up on a quarterly basis and those backups compressed 
and moved to alternate storage.  However, I have never backed up any of 
the Ubuntu systems and, although I am running SSD media, some of this is 
quite old and I'm starting to feel uncomfortable out it.

Were you aware of any winning backup solutions?  I can restore Tops-20 
to bare metal, but I really don't remember how to do this for Unix 
(although I did know it for Ultrix at one point). So I starting 
looking.  Déjà Dup looks like it won't quite do what I need, but since 
it uses duplicity, I started looking at that.

Remember, even a RAID is no substitute for backup.  This was probably 
more true in the days where a hardware RAID controller error introduced 
a single point of failure; it may still be true for a software RAID.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 10/17/21 12:03 PM, Robert Armstrong wrote:
>
>   A2RTR will be down tomorrow (Monday) for a couple of hours sometime 
> between 9AM PDT and 3PM.  It’s not my doing – PG&E is replacing a 
> transformer and the power will be off.  I have battery backup for some 
> of my equipment, but not A2RTR.  Sorry.
>
>   It’s also going to have to go down sometime again, maybe next 
> weekend, so I can replace a disk drive that’s failing.  I bought two 
> identical drives and plan to set up a RAID 1 array this time.  If 
> anybody has set up a software RAID on Ubuntu, using the md driver and 
> mdadm, for the system drive and you have advice, let me know.  
> Espcially if you managed to make both of the drives bootable.
>
>
> Bob
>
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