8800 crashing way too often

[Stergios]

We have a 8800 crashing at the rate of once every two days.  This has
been happening since January.  This is a big problem since we have
over 5000 active accounts on the system, and a total of 7700 accounts.
As you can imagine, we have quite a few very angry clients.

Quite a number of dec people have and still are looking into the
problem.  Every board has been replaced, even a new bi bus installed.
dec software engineering is leaning towards a problem in the mscp
code.

Weve installed and ran 8 different dec supplied debuggers inside the
kernel. Each one never tells what the problem is, only what the
problem is not.  Progress, I suppose.

It originally took a couple months to escalate the problem to the
point where we got attention. Now we have attention to the point of
twice weekly meetings with dec sales staff regarding our 8800
crashing.  lots-o-fun, but we still have a poorly performing machine.

There is talk of replacing out kdb50's with HSE's in the hope that the
problem will disappear.  This seems reasonable, I guess, but sounds
like a desperation move at this point.

Now we are starting to talk replacement systems (this is another story
all together, probably worse, and I wont air that kind of laundry in
public) and dec is pushing a 5500 at us.  I dont think the 5500`s
q-bus is going to take the beating our 8800 does.  we are currently
running a 5400 as an optional machine to the 8800, and the poor little
thing is choking.  I refuse to install ada and a number of other
packages on it becuase of its performance so far under our
environment.  This does not make our clients any happier: a machine
not runinng the necessary software is not any better than a crashed
machine, and we have plenty of both.

Are there any other buses or solutions available on the 5500?  I'm
asking here cause I've already been told "there is this neat way to
hook up a ra92 as a swap disk avoiding the qbus that gives an extra
M/s" by the sales types.  An extra M/s over the qbus is not going to
cut it for us.

What good is a maintenance contract? Are we being too lenient with DEC
by letting them drag this out as far as they have?

Any and all suggestions welcome.

sm
stergios at jessica.stanford.edu