TMH,

I once spent a long evening upgrading the FW on some DEC Server 1000's
and 1000A's and the events made a good story.

The FW update on some of the boxes failed in the middle right after the
point of no return where it warns you about not power cycling the server
while it updates or you may end up with an unusable system.  A panic
call to Dec tech support eventually got me to someone who knew what was
going on.  He asked for details of the server hardware and then asked:
"Promise me you won't laugh..."  

I told him I'd try not to.

He then told me to remove all the DE500 NIC's from the affected servers
and apply the firmware update again.  I howled with laughter (I was a
bit punchy by this time) and asked him how in the world did they figure
this fix out.

It appears that some smart field service techs noted that the firmware
updates only failed when a DE500 NIC was in place and tried successfully
to remove them, do the FW update and replace them.  I went ahead and
asked if they had determined the root cause for this, and was told, yes,
but you'd need a PHD in electronics to understand it.

I don't know if this relates to your problem at all, but I pass it along
just in case.

Hope it does help,

Richard Wilson
------------------------
On Mon, 2006-01-23 at 11:44 -0700, Technomage wrote:
> ok,
> here's the problem in a nutshell.
> 
> I inherited 2 EB164 DEC 21164 full tower units. one I was able to update the 
> firmware on, the other appears brain dead.
> 
> The brain dead unit was working at one time, but now, I get no console output 
> and no other indication that its even useful. the memory checks out (checked 
> it on the other machine) and, as far as I can tell, so does the cpu.
> 
> is there any way to reset this board so that I can either get a console (on 
> serial port 1) or a display (ARC windows NT mode)?
> 
> HELP!
> 
> TMH
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-- 
Richard Wilson
r dot wilson (nine) at cox dot net

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