05-Dec-2005

Hardware changed
Diana had the last VMS patches installed and I thought it a good moment to swap some hardware: DSSI out, Differential SCSI in, plus a second NIC, and CD-RW drive on the IDE bus. With some trouble (had to remove all and add one by one since the system didn't even boot, just gave some beeps and had to be powered down, even keyboard was dead!) it all worked finally - the only change in the configuration is that the Differential SCSI controller is now PQB and the originally second NEC810 controller is now PKC - which required all DKB devices to be renamed DKC. Will, it's VMS - just changing one file did the trick.
Of course it's not all 100%. I loosened one connector on the board when adding the IDE cable so network didn't work - no connection at all, and the old CD however is causing some trouble now (it could read, what seemed to be a problem sometimes previously) it won't keep closed. After I kind of forced it so, it won't open ...Just humming during startup. Pushing the button doesn't work either. Still have to check the tape unit to see if thgis is a generic problem with the internal bus - the ouside connections (BA356 with the disks that contains the webs and user environments) work well. It's not that important: the IDE disk is usable so I won't be needing the SCSI CD.
Good part: INIT on reboot does NOT remove the new controller so I will be able to boot from it!
CRASH
Next looking into the fact why TOMCAT doesn't start in batch, according accounting and audit because of some RMS error, I enabled logging but couldn't find anything but the startup program that starts the detached process. Started it manually - as usual, and all of a sudden, Diana crashed: Machine check, and current is APACHE$TOMCAT running JAVA$JAVA.EXE. Hurray - now I have a crash dump to find out why the extra 256Mb internal memory give so much trouble!
Of course it was removed again and Diana was humming happuly as usual.
CD burn - So sloooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwww
Copying an audio CD on Aphrodite takes HOURS for the last track. I'm curious what it will sound like...