Installing RS-6000 model 220 workstations
Well, IBM has finally admintted that Gary Goddard wasn't doing anything stupid. You may recall that Bruce was having no end of difficulty installing our near-diskless RS/6000 model 220's. After several software upgrades on dada, the server, and several different sets of boot tapes for the 220's, Bruce gave up and went on vacation (several days later than planned). Gary Goddard, the CCS expert on RS/6000 machines, was "called in" to see if he could figure it out. He continued to fail in exactly the same way as Bruce. The installation procedures would appear to work but when it came time to boot the workstation, it wouldn't. Usually it just hadn't gotten everything across that it was supposed to. IBM finally told us that they'd shipped us the wrong software in the first place. Shortly after that we received 20 exabyte tapes in the mail. One for each of the workstations. All identical. Gary worked with this software and watched it fail just like all the others. We went through several IBM people from London but they were of no help or just didn't believe that we weren't doing anything wrong. Finally they sent their EXPERT from Toronto -- the one who has done this before with identical machines and knows beyond doubt that it works -- and he hit the same wall as Gary. Hee hee. They did manage to get one unit up by connecting an exabyte drive directly to it and booting from it (as opposed to across the network like they wanted to). Assuming that the problem was with the network-boot from dada, they decided that they would simply boot from tape and them dump an image of a working system onto dada's disks. They would them simply copy that image across to each workstation in turn and boot them that way. Guess what? It didn't work. Oh, they got the image over there, but somehow it just won't download on the other workstations. Next step: move the exabyte from machine to machine and boot them all from tape. IBM is doing this, not us. Anyway, this procedure works fine for the first two machines. Then they trundle down the hall to the room with 20 of them in it, planning to boot them ALL over a day or so. They came back only minutes later looking very dejected. They won't boot. It seems that the RS/6000 model 220 cannot boot directly from tape. It has to boot from floppy first. None of these 20 220's have a floppy disk. Now they've got to figure out a way to boot them over the network to the point where they can boot the tape. I had the pleasure of informing them that the 220's were TWO networks away from the machine they wanted to use as a server. They just left the building. Perhaps they are only adjourning to the grad centre. hee hee... -- magi