RE: Upgrading Foxboro Boxes

[Neil Martin]

FYI,

Refurbished Sun Ultra30 boxes can be had for about $3,500 and Ultra5 for
about $1,200.




   
   
"Hicks, Gaylon F." 
   
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<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: cc:   
   
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: RE: Upgrading 
Foxboro Boxes 
oject.org> 
   
   
   
   
   
04/18/01 08:05 PM  
   
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You can pick up a refurbished SUN SPARC 5 180 MHz box for about $1000, or a
110 MHz for about $600.  This is the faster 51B box, and the 180 MHz should
be pretty snappy.  We upgraded from 51A to 51B (old 85 MHz boxes) and saw a
big improvement.  I don't know exactly what else you need, but make sure
you
get a TurboGX frame buffer card (I know these are Foxboro OEM and will
work).  Also, load up on memory - 128 MB minimum.

I know not the legalities involved, but technically this will work.

Gaylon Hicks
TVA - Browns Ferry NP

 --
 From:  Davis, Robert N.[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
 Sent:  Wednesday, April 18, 2001 12:02 PM
 To:  Foxboro DCS Mail List
 Subject:  FW: Upgrading Foxboro Boxes

 This note came to me from our Decatur plant.  Any suggestions?

 We are looking at a problem that is going to be experienced by other
plants
 in the future. We have a Foxboro I/A system here on our Cogen plant.
We have
 AW51s (A series) and V6.1 software. We recently installed the OSI PI
system
 onto one of our AW51s. What was already a slow box has become almost
 unusable. We have received a lot of complaints from the plant
operators -
 especially about the graphic call up speed.

 We have talked about upgrading the boxes to the latest AW51s (series
D or E)
 to speed things up. Unfortunately we are being quoted $100,000 by
Foxboro.
 What makes this worse is that we know we can buy the boxes from Sun
direct
 for 30% of the Foxboro price and Foxboro are charging us $50,000 for
 software licenses. Foxboro are not being very helpful at this time.
When we
 proposed buying the boxes from Sun, Foxboro refused to support these
boxes.

 We are wondering if it is technically possible to buy the new boxes
from Sun
 and try to load the existing software on ourselves. This would mean
that we
 are using the same software licenses but should get a better
performance. We
 have asked Foxboro about this and been told that it is not possible
because
 we need to buy new licenses from Sun. We have asked Sun about this
and they
 have told us that we do not need new licenses but they do not know
if this
 would work.

 Does anyone have any thoughts/experience in this matter. Is this
possible or
 are we missing something somewhere?

 All comments gratefully received


 Bob Davis
 Process Control Engineer
 765-477-5317---Fax 765-474-9036
 E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]








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Re: Upgrading Foxboro Boxes

[Harshad Viradia]

Hi list,

We are using six numbers of C boxes out of which two are used for advanced
applications and we had a problem of crashing these boxes with "panic:thread
broken" error.

Foxboro replaced the dual processors (75MHz each) with single processor (150MHz)
and we never faced this problem again.

This may be helpful for those who are using C boxes.

Thanks

Harshad




Darryl Bond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 04/19/2001 05:15:03 AM

Please respond to "Foxboro DCS Mail List"
  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To:   Foxboro DCS Mail List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc:(bcc: Harshad Viradia/JAMNAGAR/RIL)
Subject:  Re: Upgrading Foxboro Boxes



"Ball, Patrick G." wrote:
>
> Steve,
> I was originally told that the problem was with the twin processors
> on the C box (A SUN problem???).
I don't think it was a Sun problem.
Here is the output of 2 dual processor Sparc20 & Sparc10 sun boxes (non
Foxboro)
[dbond@dino dbond]$ psrinfo -v
Status of processor 0 as of: 04/19/01 08:35:42
  Processor has been on-line since 12/10/99 13:44:13.
  The sparc processor operates at 75 MHz,
and has a sparc floating point processor.
Status of processor 2 as of: 04/19/01 08:35:42
  Processor has been on-line since 12/10/99 13:44:17.
  The sparc processor operates at 75 MHz,
and has a sparc floating point processor.
[dbond@dino dbond]$ uptime
  8:35am  up 495 day(s), 18:52,  5 users,  load average: 0.01, 0.02,
0.03


[dbond@goofy dbond]$ psrinfo -v
Status of processor 0 as of: 04/19/01 08:34:04
  Processor has been on-line since 11/19/99 06:15:10.
  The sparc processor operates at 60 MHz,
and has a sparc floating point processor.
Status of processor 2 as of: 04/19/01 08:34:04
  Processor has been on-line since 11/19/99 06:15:14.
  The sparc processor operates at 60 MHz,
and has a sparc floating point processor.
[dbond@goofy dbond]$ uptime
  8:34am  up 517 day(s),  2:19,  8 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.05,
0.06
[dbond@goofy dbond]$


> The fix was to disable one of the
> processor, but we were upgrading for a faster machine. I think that is why
> they changed to D and E boxes. ???
We used the Foxboro upgrade to 150Mhz single processor which fixed the
lockups which we saw with the AW51C. This is the report from an upgraded
AW51C
[dbond@6GA111 dbond]$ psrinfo -v
Status of processor 0 as of: 04/19/01 08:42:03
  Processor has been on-line since 05/23/00 09:22:16.
  The sparc processor operates at 150 MHz,
and has a sparc floating point processor.
[dbond@6GA111 dbond]$ uptime
  8:42am  up 330 day(s), 23:20,  2 users,  load average: 0.30, 0.18,
0.15

Darryl Bond

>
> Patrick
> PSDF
>
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Murray, Steve [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2001 2:25 PM
> > To:   'Foxboro DCS Mail List'
> > Subject:  RE: Upgrading Foxboro Boxes
> >
> > Hi Patrick,
> >
> >   We bought a AW51C a few years ago as part of a new system.  It would
> > crash
> > for no apparent reason and the Foxboro installation team replaced it with
> > a
> > AW51B before turning the system over to us.  We were later told that
> > Foxboro
> > quit using the Cs altogether.
> >
> > Stephen Murray
> > Asarco
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Ball, Patrick G. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2001 10:59 AM
> > To: 'Foxboro DCS Mail List'
> > Subject: RE: Upgrading Foxboro Boxes
> >
> >
> > Robert,
> >   I am located at the PSDF (Power System Development Facility) her in
> > Wilsonville, AL. back a couple of years ago, we upgraded to an AW51C from
> > AW51A box (Ver. 4.1). We also have OSI PI system. I thought the A box was
> > slow, but when we got our C box, it would run fine without PI running, but
> > when PI was started the C box would crash in about 45 minutes. We had to
> > get
> > an AW51E box to fix the problem. We did work it out since we had just
> > upgraded to a C box. I know this probably does not answer your question,
> > but
> > I thought I would throw this in.
> >
> > Patrick G. Ball
> > Internet Address -- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Intercompany -- 8-824-5877
> > Bell Phone -- 1-205-670-5877
> > Beeper -- 1-877-986-6814
> > 
> >
> > This transmission is for the intended addressee only and is confidential
> > information. If you have received this transmission in error, please
> > delete
> > it and notify the sender. The contents of this E-mail are the opinion of
> > the
> > writer only and are not endorsed by ASARCO Inc. unless expressly stated
> > otherwise.
> >
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