Re: [9fans] Alpha success (w/ clock.c bugfix and ether2114x.c update)

[jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com]

On Tue Oct 23 00:54:32 EDT 2001, mike@ducky.net wrote:
> >Sorry we couldn't help with the problem, but we have no working alpha
> 
> Wow!  What happened to your Alpha?
> 
> So, is anyone else out there running Plan 9 on the Alpha?

During the summer I moved the Alpha out of my office and into the
machine room and found that it wouldn't talk to the HP Procurve switch.
This was confusing as there were 2 other Plan 9 machines on that switch
using the same generation DE-500 (21140 based) ethernet cards - one of
them was our main fileserver. I spent a frustrating couple of days
trying to get it to work which involved a lot of power-cycling of the
Alpha due to the nature of the problem and eventually the Alpha just
said enough and refused to work at all.

So, I asked if anything had changed with the Procurve switch and the 
answer was no, well, actually we upgraded the firmware in all of them by
rotating them out with a spare. I tried the other DE-500 based system
and found it wouldn't talk to the Procurve either. Somehow the upgrade
had been done without taking the systems down so fortunately the
fileserver was still working (no idea how, but miracles sometimes happen).
I had to replace the ether card in the fileserver as, sure enough, after
a reboot it too couldn't talk to the Procurve.