- Did a logical reconfiguration of the Ethernet this week. Cajon, Lander,
and Bbear are now on one logical segment. Bigone, Avalon, Mecca, Malibu,
and Indio are on a separate segment. These segments are linked through the
DECswitch 900, which also connects them to the main Ethernet. After doing
this reconfiguration, the traffic level on the Ethernet segments with the
VAXes dropped considerably.
- Part of the network reconfiguration involved moving our connection to the
department server off of the DECswitch and on to the regular Ethernet cable.
- Katrin needed to read some old [circa 1977] 9-track tapes. Found a VAX
utility to read them off of the old 800bps tapes and copy them onto 1600bps
tapes that Katrin can read on the Unix machine.
- Attended a USGS staff meeting and the weekly Timers meeting.
- Called DEC to get price quotes for some software licenses that are not
included in the CSLG license list.
- Created a virtual LAT port on one of the terminal server to provide a
data stream to the Associated Press modem. Assisted Steve and a tech from
AP in getting the wiring from the port to the modem to work correctly.
- Moved some disks this week. MEM04 was moved off of Avalon and onto
Bigone. This displaced MEM03, which was moved to Malibu. Also moved the
ARK0 disk and associated tape drive from Indio to Bbear. The first disk
move was to move data off of Avalon so that it can be brought up in the new
Tejon VAXcluster under the new versions of VMS and CUSP. The second move
was to eliminate one network transfer step when archiving data.
- Got the VAX software distribution CDs from CCO.
- Tejon was hung on Thursday morning. The only way to get it unstuck was
to force a system crash. Analysis of the crash dump and system error log
revealed that the system had suffered an error in its SCSI controller,
which led to the disks going off line. This caused much of the system to
get stuck waiting for the disks to come back. This appears to be an
intermittent problem on Tejon.
- Installed UCX on Tejon so that it will match Carizo and for testing of
the DEC TCP/IP software. Also installed updates to C, FORTRAN, and GKS.
- Figured out how to configure printers under UCX in order to create print
queues on the VMS 6.1 cluster.
- Booted Avalon into the VMS 6.1 cluster for testing the new version of
Timit.
- The PC that I have as my office workstation died on Tuesday. The boot
partition had become corrupted. The disk appeared not to have suffered any
physical damage, and a re-install of the operating system restored it to
operation.
- Installed GKS version 6.1 on Tejon in order to back it down a version
from the version 6.3 GKS which caused some problems for the new version of
Timit.
- After testing GKS 6.1, it was decided that we needed to fall back to
version 6.0, which is where we were before upgrading last week.
- Got copies of Netscape Navigator for VAX and Alpha VMS.
- Rebooted Coso in order to re-create its boot directory tree on Tejon.
This is so that the number of its root directory will properly correspond
to its DECnet address.
- Assisted Katrin with reading some more old 9-track tapes.
- Discovered a bug in the system backup procedure that caused a problem for
one of the Friday night backups from last week. Reran the backup after
fixing the bug.
- Steve Jones from CSU Northridge called with problem with the GETMEM
procedure. This turned out to be caused by a hard-coded reference to the
MEM04 disk in its old location. Changing the reference to use the system
logical name for the disk fixed the problem.
- Cleaned up some old files on the system disk on Bigone.
- Created an account on Bigone for Tovah so that she can run QED for Lisa.
- Ran defragmentation on the Cajon on-line system disks.
- Did a logical reconfiguration of the Ethernet this week. Cajon, Lander,
and Bbear are now on one logical segment. Bigone, Avalon, Mecca, Malibu,
and Indio are on a separate segment. These segments are linked through the
DECswitch 900, which also connects them to the main Ethernet. After doing
this reconfiguration, the traffic level on the Ethernet segments with the
VAXes dropped considerably.
- Moved some disks around between systems to reduce the number of required
network transfers between systems. This also helps to reduce the network
load.
- Moved Avalon into the new VMS 6.1 cluster so that Kate can test the new
version of Timit.
- Got a VMS version of Netscape and installed it on Tejon and Carizo. Also
performed several software upgrades on these machines.