Conference 7.286::fddi

1065.0. "DEFZA in VS4000-90 / Microcode problems" by VIVIAN::JD_WARD (The show goes on, and on, and on....) Fri Aug 20 1993 06:05

I am adding this note in the notesfile as there doesn't appear to be much
documentation regarding DEFZA on VMS system.


One of our customer's has 20 VAXstation 4000 model 90 SPXgt with revision 
E05 DEFZA modules. 

The customer had a faulty DEFZA module in one of the VAXstation 4000 model 90, 
didn't have LED light either lit green or red and the DECconcentrator 500 LED
was flashing green. Once the system was shut down I was able to see the 
TURBOchannel as option 13. I then ran >>> TEST/UTIL 13 . I then ran 
>>>t tc0 cnfg and saw the version to be T5.2P. When I booted VMS, 
this is the error message I got:

	% FCA0 Your DEC FDDI Controller 700 is not at the current revision
	  level. Revision must be 1.2 or greater.

The DEFZA module in the system in the system is revision E05, which replaced
the faulty DEFZA revision C03, which replaced the original DEFZA revision B02.

When try to configure the module the following errors occur in the " ".

$ set ver
$ mc ncp define line fza-0 state on prot ethernet receive buffer 10
$ mc ncp set line fza-0 state on prot ethernet receive buffer 10

 "NCP-W-OPEFAI OPERATION FAILURE"
 "SYSTEM-F-DEVOFFLINE, device is not in configuration or not available
                       data overrun
		       unit is offline"


When the faulty DEFZA from customer's site was installed in a in-house VS4000
model 90, it produces the same problem (ie. revision below 1.2). I ordered a
new DEFZA, which was the same h/w revision must of had, a higher microcode 
revision than 1.2, because when VMS booted up, it didn't produce the error. 
Also both FCA0 and FCA1 was both online. Whereas the customer's faulty module 
had FCA1 online and FCA0 offline. I installed DECndu which enables the 
download of microcode firmware for the relevant platform. After hours of 
trying to get this function working, we found that you need at least two FDDI 
nodes on the ethernet before it can download the microcode to the DEFZA.

I have told the customer to buy the DECNDU-V license, so that they can perform
this operation in future.

I have since be told that you can't dowload the image file using DECndu on 
VAXstation 4000 model 90 systems. 

So if the microcode version of the module is less than 1.1, we can't keep
on ordering these modules until we have one with microcode version 1.2


Any thoughts anybody ?

John Ward

    Is there anybody out there...... with any ideas?
    
    
    John
    

The problem isn't the hardware revision, it's the firmware revision.
You must be running 1.0 or 1.1.  You need 1.2 (or preferrably 1.3).
The bad news is you need an ULTRIX or OSF/1 system to update it.