From: bill@bilver.uucp (Bill Vermillion)
Subject: Hardware support HORROR story!
Organization: W. J. Vermillion - Winter Park, FL
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 02:42:11 GMT

One of my clients is a local community college.  In one area we
have several SCO Xenix machines.   We are consolidating a bunch
of small machines into a few larger machines.

One is an IBM Model 80-121.   That' the unit with the 115 megs
SCSI drive.   The system has a 2nd SCSI drive of about 600 megs
capacity.   1 DAT drive backup and five 8-port RIO modules from
Specialix.

About a month ago I noticed the system was not recognizing
about 2 megs of memory so I ran the IBM diagnostic, and got an
error message (forgot the exact number) of a system board failure,
and to contact support.

Since these machines are all under an IBM support contract, no
big deal.

IBM gets called.   They hem and haw and say they are busy and
will be a day or so.  The contact at the school pointed up the
fact that they are promised four hour support.   So mumble,
grumble, they send another support person out.  This was on a
Thursay morning.

(I didn't see any of the rest of this story, but was told it by
the software support person and the hardware support person of
the college - the latter is really pretty sharp).

Tech replaces the motherboard.    Nothing happens.  System
dead.   They figure it is a bad motherboard.  They order in
another overnight.  Machine now down for one day.

About 2pm on Friday afternoon I get a page. I'm about 70 miles
away in Cocoa Fl, and get the follwing relayed to me over the phone.

The tech puts in a new motherboard.    Not really sure as the
tech comments she hasn't ever set up a SCSI IBM-80 before.
(That should have been the warning flag to have everything stop
right there!).  Couldn't figure out what that extra board was -
it was the hard drive with the circuit board fading out!

Now to put in the motherboard everything has to come out.   So
everything gets put back.  She is on the phone to her support
person who ask about C: drive or D: drive.  Woops - this is
Xenix - another warning flag ignored.    About half the time
our tech has to remind the other tech to turn the power off
before putting in a board!!!

So it gets assembled, and she is talking on the phone to her
support tech and describing the sparks and smoke coming out of
the drive when she turns it on!  Didn't have enough sense to
turn it off immediately!!!! :-(

So another day goes by.  I'm on the other side of the state
this time - near the Gulf in Clearwater.  When I get back I
have a message that I can come in Sunday and re-install the OS
from backups.

Final result was that on Saturday another new motherboard was
installed, the primary SCSI drive was replaced, the SCSI
controller was replaced, and for good measure the system board
memory was replaced.

Got it running.  Seems okay.

A full week later someone says, "Did Karen tell you she's
having trouble with backups".   So I go and check.  

I can write to the DAT drive, but if I try to verify and read the
tape back it will hang the entire system, and the only cure is
to power it off.

Seems the DAT was hooked up to the SCSI bus when they fried the
system on Friday, and indications are that it's not a happy
camper either at the moment.

So IBM was called again.   They replied "It was working when I
left".   The support person at the school asked, "Did you try
the tape"?  The answer. "No."   How in hell are they suppose to
know if it worked or not if they didn't try it ?????

What the hell has happened to support in this country anyway?

Has anybody else had anything like this happen to them, or we
just unusually lucky :-(.

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bill@bilver.oau.org  bill@bilver.uucp
                - ..!{peora|tous|tarpit}!bilver!bill