[rescue] needed: u1 NVRAM chip

[Carl R. Friend]

    On Wed, 24 Sep 2008, Bill Bradford wrote:

> In the past two days I've fixed or brought back to life two different
> machines that were 8+ years old.

    That's routine for me as well.  And also why $boss *requires*
me to be on-site for things like power-downs even if I have
concrete conflicts.  Yes, it's an abuse of power, but I have no
choice in the matter.  I feel Bill's pain.

> Our policy is "If it's a production machine, it needs to be a
> production-class machine, not someone's old desktop, with a service
> contract."  However, if an ancient machine dies or goes down, I *cant*
> refuse to try to fix it; that's my job.

    Yep, that's where it's gotten to.

    Bill, don't feel bad -- your U1 is a positive baby compared to
what I have to keep running.  We've got an SS-10 from the Jurassic
Era that runs a license-manager, including licenses that we can't
get re-cut because the original vendor no longer exists.  I'm just
waiting for that machine to kick off....  (This is also why, when
$PPOE did the last hardware purge, I squirrelled a pair of SS-10s
away in my office as spares.)

    Sometimes I really hate being a "soup-to-nuts" admin.

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
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