EISA boards

[John C. Archambeau]

evan at telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes:
>I must say my first expreience with an EISA system has been a nightmare,
>and the perceived improvements certainly don't outweigh the pain.
>
>HARDWARE:
>	ALR PowerCache 4e (486)
>	600Meg disk,
>	24 Meg RAM,
>	Corollory 8x4 multiplexed serial board (32 ports),
>	Western Digital EtherPlus 16.
>	Wangtek 150Meg Tape
>
>SOFTWARE:
>	ESIX Rev D
>
>PROBLEM:
>
>The systems (two identical ones) crash sporadically when reading or
>writing the tape drives. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it causes
>kernel panics (the lovely kind that try to dump system RAM into swap).
>The problem was not repeatable at will, but frequent enough to make the
>systems useless for their intended applications.
>
>SOLUTION:
>
>Moving the Wangtek tape controllers from EISA slots to the 16-bit ISA
>"compatability" slots resolved that problem. The tapes now work just fine.
>
>SIDE-EFFECT:
>
>Now the system panics sometimes, with the same error messages, when
>reading from or writing to ... the floppy!
>
>If indeed the EISA slots are supposed to, by definition, be backwards
>compatible with ISA slots, why would moving a board from an EISA slot to
>an ISA slot change the machine's behavior?
>
>Or is this a "standard" that each manufacturer implements differently? :-(

This is the precise reason that I want to avoid EISA.  If you all thought I
was screaming because of the recommendations of EISA over MCA I got.  You
ain't seen nothing, if I would have gone EISA (haven't bought the system yet)
over MCA and something like this would have happened, I would have screamed a
hell of a lot more.  :)

Such behavior is no where near acceptable for a Unix box.

Of course, WangTek tape drives (save their DAT's) aren't that great of a
machine.  I remember adding one to a customer's Sun SPARCstation 1+ and it
never quite did work 100% of the time.  Finally, it died completely a couple
of weeks ago.  I called up MicroNet for the RMA and found out they don't
bundle WangTek tape drives with their storage systems anymore.  Too many
problems with them.  So I ended up replacing the WangTek with what MicroNet
supports now; a Tandberg.  Never had a problem with it again.

Since MicroNet hasn't given me anything but acceptable service for me and my
customers, I will side with them on matters concerning the reliability of a
given manufacturer.

     // JCA

 /*
 **--------------------------------------------------------------------------*
 ** Flames  : /dev/null                     | What to buy?
 ** ARPANET : crash!pnet01!jca at nosc.mil     | EISA or MCA?
 ** INTERNET: jca at pnet01.cts.com            | When will the bus wars end?
 ** UUCP    : {nosc ucsd hplabs!hp-sdd}!crash!pnet01!jca
 **--------------------------------------------------------------------------*
 */