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Date:      Sat, 22 Apr 1995 17:04:46 -0700
From:      "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@freefall.cdrom.com>
To:        hackers@freefall.cdrom.com
Subject:   What's going on with 2.0.5.
Message-ID:  <7438.798595486@freefall.cdrom.com>

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Just thought I owed everyone a status report, so here it is..  I'll
try to be brief, thus conserving both your time and my own!

Wcarchive died on the operating table when we attempted to add 3
drives to it.  We didn't attempt to do anything especially creative,
we simply optioned and plugged 3 more drives into our expansion rack.
Of course, this is a PC we're talking about here, the notorious
Chihuahua of the hardware world, so no one was particularly surprised
by these antics.  We pushed too hard and it fell over!  Happens all
the time!

Since then, wcarchive has been hauled back up to Concord and gone into
major overhaul mode.  Its motherboard, always been somewhat flakey and
weird with the 192MB of memory (this very early ASUS we're talking
here), has been replaced.  The aging 1742 in it that had also finally
decided that its natural lifespan had been exceeded has been replaced,
though we're making another field trip out today to hopefully settle
the overall controller situation since the Bt747c is now unhappy with
its life!  Things are not happy in wcarchive's case.

This came at a bad time for all concerned, naturally, given the degree
of overlap in our amount of concern for wcarchive (our most visible
baby on the Internet) and our release schedule for 2.0.5.  Also not
comforting have been some of the problems encountered in trying to get
wcarchive to run 2.0-current (we *really* need 4GB partitions on that
machine!) with the 2742 controllers.  Justin has discovered some
interesting things about the later revisions of these controllers, and
I think that I can easily forsee some patches coming out of that in
the next few days.  Since the AHC support is a pretty vital component
of 2.0.5 (a lot of people are using these things!), I would also say
it'd be worth holding the release an extra day or two for that alone.

Suffice it to say that 2.0.5 is going to slip ANYWAY.  We want a
chance to test wcarchive under more serious load, find and fix the
things that cause it to fall over and then take that final "it's not
running too bad, boss!" collection of bits and call it 2.0.5.  Those
working on wcarchive will be also be somewhat distracted away from
2.0.5, as you'd expect, and I have no immedate estimate as to the
amount of slippage that will result.  I can at least say with some
authority that 2.0.5 will NOT be going out this weekend! :-(

Thanks.

						Jordan






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