[rescue] Re: [geeks] THIS. MAKES. ME. SICK.

[Chris Petersen]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 06:29:54PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 07:20:43PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> >   Several machines do that.  Tandems, in particular.
> 
> EMC as well.  Customers are only allowed to look upon the boxes, and
> never touch them. 8-)  We get phone calls before drives on the EMC
> frames fail all the time.
> 
> "yeah.. we own that.. over there.. but if I breathe on it, a SE
>  shows up mumbling about excessive air currents.."
> 
> Bill
> 

Yep, the site I'm at now has IBM 'frames, Hitachi & EMC arrays which *all*
do the "phone home" stuff.  It's actually one of their requirements...
And the EMC bit is the worst.  Same thing here - they "own" them, but you
don't dare touch it...Hitachi is much better about that sort of thing (and
cheaper and faster, you get the picture...).  

The last place I worked at had AS/400s with the same IBM "phone home" setup. 
When I asked one of the AS/400 ops about it, I was told it's apparently a
condition/feature of the service contract.  In fact, we had so many 400s at
that place that we rated our own IBM guy in Fishkill, NY, just waiting for
that "phone" to ring.  I'm sure that in reality he watched a few customers
machines, but as I understood IBM dedicates those guys to a few large
customers and as backups for the smaller customers...

Speaking of frames, they just swapped out a G4 S/390 for a later model G4
S/390 here a few months back.  I was particularly impressed at the ThinkPad
that sat in the back of the unit on a dedicated bracket to act as what we
would consider "console"...

Chris

-- 
Chris Petersen
Systems Engineer, Industry Services, Unigraphics Solutions Inc.
Co-founder, auctions.workstations.org
Email: havoc at apk.net