VMS is not the evil empire

[Sharan Kalwani]

In article <210 at hotlr.ATT> dkc at hotlr.UUCP (Dave Cornutt) writes:
>
..some material deleted...
>(I once spent 20
>minutes on the phone with someone from Remote Diag trying to convince
>them that there was such a thing.  I eventually gave up, hung up the
>phone, and called back in the hopes that I wouldn't get the same person.
>Fortunately, I didn't.)

 A very amusing story of how the FS folks got surprised by a micro diag
failing and later some problem with Remote Diag folks (which got
resolved also in an amusing manner)]

While I did not have the same memory problem, on my 750 the VMS diags
would routinely fail and the FS folks would dutifully take the printout and
promise to check and let me know. This went on for months before I discovered
that there was a bug in that version of the diag (called ECKAM or something,
they sure pick odd names :-)! The reason it failed was because the diag needed
a minimum of 6 meg to run correctly :-) and we had 4 meg.

Well then once RDC called in and ran the same usual tests - they told me
I had failing memory and it should be replaced. I then had to try to convince
that that was not the problem and finally ended up asking for their
senior most engineer there. He listened and took my reference about the
bug, dug it up and agreeded that it was indeed the case. 


I have since upgraded it to 8 Meg and yes the diag now works correctly :-)

>This was all five years ago.  Fortunately, things appear to have changed
>for the better since then.

Well this happened roughly two years ago, but recently I got a call from someone
at DEC telling me things are now improving. Let's  hope he is right
and we can expect more understanding support persons.

>Dave Cornutt, AT&T Bell Labs (rm 4A406), Holmdel, NJ (Note new address!)
>UUCP:{ihnp4,allegra,cbosgd}!hotly!dkc (path stolen from Shelley)


-- 
sharan "alf" kalwani.  110 east warren detroit mi 48201. (313) 833-0710 x411
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