8800 crashing way too often

[George Robbins]

In article <STERGIOS.90Oct29193129 at kt22.Stanford.EDU> stergios at jessica.stanford.edu writes:
> 
> 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.
...
> 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.
...
> What good is a maintenance contract? Are we being too lenient with DEC
> by letting them drag this out as far as they have?

I think the most important step would be to escalate the problem within
DEC until you reach the level where the the players have enough discretion
to deal with your problem outside of normal channels.  You will probably
have to have someone up your hierarchy with a title or some claim to the
purse strings get involved.  Anyway, what you want is to force DEC to define
a plan to both resolve your problem and also ameliorate the pain while they
are doing so.

I'd be inclined to reject the 5400/5500 approach and insist they supply
a second similar machine, either another 8800 or 64X0 with suitable memory
and disks.  This should help pin down if it's a hardware or software
problem and then you can demand appropriate engineering or support talent.

Considerable dynamism on your part wil be required, but it's better to
take the offensive than to stay mired in the low-level runaround.  DEC can't
afford to allow large, vocal and visible embarrassments fester, but it's
up to you to elevate your problem to that category.

*** these are, of course, only personal notions and not legal advice ***

-- 
George Robbins - now working for,     uucp:   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing:   domain: grr at cbmvax.commodore.com
Commodore, Engineering Department     phone:  215-431-9349 (only by moonlite)