[geeks] On Sun Hardware

[Eric Dittman]

> > > The fact that such a thing even needs to be said speaks volumes for the
> > > quality of hardware that Sun makes (or, in the case of the A1000,
> > > resells).
> >
> > All software has bugs. As much as we would like to think otherwise, it's
> > a fact of life that such bugs will exist.
> 
> Uh, I wasn't complaining.  "Make sure you reboot every couple of years"
> versus the "once a week/day" recommendations from the PC world really
> leaves no comparison.
> 
> However, I still like the bug report on how VMS didn't properly display
> uptimes in excess of 9 years, 364 days.  BTW, that's not an urban
> legend, is it?

This is not an urban legend.  The field for the number of days the system
had been up did not have enough digits.  After 999 days, the field only
displayed ***.  That's almost three years.

There has been a bug that has been showing up lately where one of the
fields in the cluster-wide database rolls over, preventing any new
systems from joining a cluster.  This field is updated and assigned to
a system that just joined the cluster, even if it was a member before
and was shut down for some reason.  The first incident reported was
on a cluster that was up over 13 years, IIRC.
-- 
Eric Dittman
dittman at dittman.net