Re: A Customer's Request For Open Source Software

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@attbi.com>]

Edward Rice wrote:
> 
> Can you actually point to any site that re-cabled a processor or IOM or SCU
> without powering down the system, Robert?  At AFDSC, we did about as much
> dynamic reconfiguration (and upgrading) as any place, but when it came time
> to disconnect power and data cables, HFED wanted the system all to
> themselves.
> 
> We certainly split our system without bringing down service -- that was a
> daily operation.  But I don't consider adding back a processor at 5:00 AM
> that was removed at 8:00 PM the previous evening to be an upgrade.

At BCO in Billerica, MA it was actually done at least once or twice that 
I was aware of.  As you point out, it is a power and cabling issue.  We 
did have every box on its own circut breaker, so doing it was a lot less 
dangerous.  But remember, that in this situation it helped a lot that 
BCO was part of Honeywell, and there was some trading back and forth of 
staff with CISL in Cambridge, MA, where they hacked their own Multics 
system a lot.  (CISL was the development site for Multics.)

As for disk and tape drives, that was done all the time.

The only two times I can remember BCO being down, a squirrel jumped from 
one power wire coming into the building to another in the rain.  I also 
can't remember any occasion where Honeywell support people came to our 
site.  Doesn't mean it didn't happen.  However there were at least a 
dozen times where someone from CISL showed up to do a hardware mod, or 
to oversee an OS upgrade.

Even though we were a different part of Honeywell from CISL, the 
geographic convenience meant that we were often the first non-CISL site 
to install a software upgrade or hardware fix.  Those hardware fixes 
were the occasions where one processor at a time was shut down, modified 
and added back in.

But again, the reason it was so nice was that it was much nicer to live 
with fewer processors for most of a day, compared to shutting the site 
down for a day or two to do the same thing.

--
                                          Robert I. Eachus

"As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure." -- Jacques Chirac, 
President of France
"As far as France is concerned, you're right." -- Rush Limbaugh