Re: Calling Customer Service for bad sectors

["William M. York" <York@chuck-jones.ila-west.dialnet.symbolics.com>]

    Date: Sun, 20 Nov 88 18:56:25 CST
    From: forbus@p.cs.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Forbus)

	    The tools in sys:n-fep;fix-fep-block.lisp can splice out
	    bad blocks and generally repair things.

    Well, the only thing I have in sys:n-fep; is a bunch of flod files.
    So I don't seem to have these tools.

I think that they were distributed with the 7.2 sources, but I could be
wrong.
	
	    My point is that it is probably quicker, less painful, and quite
	    possibly cheaper for Mr. Srouji to have customer service take care of
	    the problem.  If he is on contract and he has recent LMFS backup tapes,
	    why suffer needlessly?

    Have you ever restored a large LMFS?  Doing the sector fix takes about
    20 seconds if you have the code.  Compared to hours for restoring the
    LMFS, not counting down time waiting for customer service.

    And if you try to do board swaps...

All right, all right.  I am certainly not going to try to tell you that
Symbolics customer service is doing right by you.  I guess that your
basic position is "If Symbolics customer service is going to suck so
hard, then the least they can do is give me the tools and documentation
to handle the problems myself."  Not an unreasonable stance, but I still
stand by my original recommendation that the average customer with such
a serious problem (remember, the initial problem wasn't simply an ECC
error or something) is probably better off dealing with service than
immediately reaching for the nearest disk munging tool.  'Nuff said?