Installing WEBES on "older" Alphas?

[Dave Gudewicz]

I read that one can install WEBES on most any Alpha providing it meets several requirements, such as VMS 7.3-2 (minimum w/patches), etc. So far, so good.

I also read that the SEA system requirements are for "newer" Alphas; DSxx, ESxx and GSxx. OK, got it.

My confusion follows....

What is the purpose of being able to install and run WEBES on lets say an AS4100 (aka older Alpha)?

[Hoff · Accepted solution]

This whole area is quite murky; I've not seen a clear delineation posted here, and there's a small forest of acronyms and products.

My understanding is that the older platform hardware errors and some storage errors are decoded by DECevent, newer platform hardware and newer storage errors by CA/SEA/WEBES, and the integrated ELV is able to decode various of the core errors without requiring an add-on tool. So you may well end up using one or potentially even all three, depending on what you are dealing with.

You might end up working with the OSEM and rolling up to the HP SIM stuff, too.

Wander over to the diagnostic tools web page for some baseline details:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/svctools/

I really wish somebody would wade into this area and update the above page with these details; I've certainly had and seen questions similar to yours.

[Volker Halle]

Dave,

while you could technically install WEBES on an 'older' Alpha - assuming you meet the prerequisites - it won't do you much good.

WEBES (DESTA, SEA) is a very memory and CPU intense application, which may be a burden to run on older and slower Alphas. You could - of course - copy your ERRLOG.SYS files from other systems to that node and analyze them with the WEBES/SEA GUI, but this would not make sense, you would prefer to do this on a Windows PC or a faster OpenVMS system.

Please note that while OpenVMS V7.3-2 and higher contain ELV (Error Log Viewer), this tool can not translate most errlog entries and is quite useless.

For older Alphas, you still would want to run DECevent (DIAGNOSE) V3.4. It is still the best tool to translate SCSI related errors and CPU/memory related errors from systems not supported for by SEA, i.e. systems older than DS10, GS80 and such.

Volker.

[Dave Gudewicz]

Thanks for the info. Time to (again) RTFM.