Donna,

We went to 6.0 about 2 weeks ago.  Prior to that I had the same concerns
and placed a similar question on this list.

The feedback that I received reveled a number of problems that people
encountered.  Those included:

1.  Bad firmware in their DDS drives caused their update to halt.
2.  Problems with the 'pseudo manager' settings in sysgen also caused
problems.
3.  Wrong firmware in their FW controllers could present problems (if not
on 6.0, surely on 6.5).
     (This maybe related to the 'sysdiag' suit 'going away' and thus one
would have to either
      'backdate' their system or take out the board, put it in a 5.5 or 6.0
system, upgrade the
     firmware and then proceed with the update)

The above concerns caused me to 'inventory' the current firmware versions
of all DDS drives, disk drives and FW controllers.  I opened a hardware
call and had my CE bring the most current firmware versions.

I scheduled some down time and we quickly upgraded the firmware on the SCSI
devices.  The FW controller firmware, however, was another story.  The CE
kept insisting that there was no need to upgrade the firmware even though
my current versions were not the same on all of the controllers AND they
were below the 3944 version that was mentioned by someone on this list.

The CE sensed my concern and decided to call the RC.  He was told that the
recommendation was to go to 3944 especially since all of the controllers
were not on the same version.

The firmware for the SCSI devices were 'extracted' from a 'bootable' CD.
The ones for the FW controllers, however, were a pain in the xxxx to
retrieve.
The process for retrieving them is geared towards a 'Unix' system and there
was no way of getting them off the CD (In fact they may not have even been
included on it).  The RC faxed to us a couple of documents with detailed
steps on getting the firmware (KBRC00003711 and S3100008545 'Updating the
28696A firmware on MPE systems').  The documents confirmed that we could
not extract the firmware (no access to Unix system, etc...) and thus the CE
created the tape, in the proper 'store' format, back in his office, and
brought it back the next day.  I applied the firmware just before upgrading
to 6.0.

Regards
Paul Christidis





Gilles Schipper wrote:

> LDEV 1 should be ok, with respect to scsi id's. Unfortunately, your tape
> drive (presumeably ldev 7) WILL BECOME INACCESSIBLE as will all other
scsi
> devices if not PROPERLY configured.
>
> To conform to the more stringent 6.0 requirements, all scsi devices
> (including tape drives) should have "pseudo" devices in the directly
> preceding path.

afaik, all the systems having pseudo's preceding each path.  i'll be
checking, of
course....  so....i shouldn't worry about incorrect device id's?          -
d

--
Donna Garverick     Sr. System Programmer
925-210-6631        [log in to unmask]

"Unix _is_ user friendly.
It's just very selective about who its friends are.
And sometimes even best friends have fights."

>>>MY opinions, not Longs Drug Stores'<<<