I was experimenting with a spare Siemens 9006.3. I found that if I loaded the system with hard drive A, I could install hard drive B and do EXE-UPDAT A1 and BP ALL, and the config of A is now on drive B. Drive B had an older version of Unix without Direct Amo. I thought by doing the A1 update it may have loaded A's Unix, but apparently not. The old root password still works on B, with that I can enter UFAMOS and get into Direct Amo. I was surprised to see the system allowed the database that was originally from a system with an new Unix version to be saved on the hard drive with the older Unix (without Direct Amo). It appears I'd need to do a Unix restore from tape to get to the newer version.
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Siemens 9006 observations
- Thread starter keyset6
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The RMX and Unix are different operating systems working on different partitions of the hard drives.
Yes you can do it and you have done it !
but you now have an incompatibility on the hard drive with the 'wrong' version of the unix on it.
Yes you can do it and you have done it !
but you now have an incompatibility on the hard drive with the 'wrong' version of the unix on it.
I have used an old system to do an HD recovery to a new drive for a failed system, and then installed the drive and done the UPDAT thing you just talked about (and heard the HollyJulia chorus playing in the background when it happened) but always the same principal version of the OS - maybe the latest SMR or Patch Package I had lying around, but never to a completely different OS version. Pretty cool that you could do it! I'm trying to remember if I ever had 6.3... Maybe I did at my main site. I know my first one was 6.2 and then for sure I remember 6.4, 6.5, 6.5A, and 6.6. I can't remember 6.3... LC-Win didn't come about until 6.4, and even then it was pretty unstable until you got up to Patch Package F or so....
I know RMX and unix are 2 different ways you can get into the switch, but I thought they both used the same database. I have a 30EP on 6.5 right now that has a corrupt unix boot file so it refuses to start unix, but I put a modem on the RMX port and that's how I do minor changes right now. It only has to last long enough for them to get the data off of it for the 4000 upgrade. The annoying thing about a modem on the RMX port is if you do too much and overflow the buffer it locks up, and then you have to have someone at the site power cycle the modem in order to get in again.
I know RMX and unix are 2 different ways you can get into the switch, but I thought they both used the same database. I have a 30EP on 6.5 right now that has a corrupt unix boot file so it refuses to start unix, but I put a modem on the RMX port and that's how I do minor changes right now. It only has to last long enough for them to get the data off of it for the 4000 upgrade. The annoying thing about a modem on the RMX port is if you do too much and overflow the buffer it locks up, and then you have to have someone at the site power cycle the modem in order to get in again.
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- #4
I don't know how I appeared to have attached a link to my post with that A. Didn't mean to do that... I also had a system with a bad hard drive (very noisy) without Unix so I connected our RS-232 to ethernet converter to the RMX port. Fortunately I never had trouble requiring it to be reset. but changes were very infrequent. The old EMML %CHASTN or something like that in the 6.3 was so slow - if you were to just change a forwarding destination for example the utility would delete all the phone configuration and recreate the whole thing. If a phone went off hook that had a line appearance of the phone being changed the script would bomb out. It was a big help when direct amo became available. LC-Win was nice, except for creating something with ACD groups, don't recall what it was - but you'd need to do that from RMX or EMML. Maybe a DNIT with a RCG. I guess now the release 6.5 is considered quite old. Probably not many 6.3 systems left out there.
If I was just changing a destination I would do that thru the EMML in the olden days of Shift-F5 I think it was that would let me enter the AMO directly and use DEST. I actually spent a week in training in '96 for the EMML stuff, which included how to use Shift-F5 to access the AMOs, so when DAD came out I was ready to go. I was happy because I was one of the last holdouts for going to Windows - I wanted to hang on to my command line as long as possible and I hate menus. To this day I still do a few things in cmd.exe in Windows. I did use %CHASTN, and then they came out with the first version of 6.5 and took it away I was pissed - for a while there it was really hard to do some of the stuff.
LC-Win is a tool that is nice to work with in v4.0 where they finally got the functionality pretty useful, but like all tools, one size doesn't fit all, and I still spend a lot of time in DAD. Taking the check mark out of "In Service", hitting OK, then going back and putting it back in and hitting OK again is not the same as DEA-DSSU and ACT-DSSU when a station is in DEFIL, and you can't even tell that's the case without SDSU. Plus LC-Win will not allow some of the basic changes to a station in a hunt group, and it whines, where all you do is drop into DAD and run the command and it works just fine...
The other thing that sucks is still needing to use ProComm to get into unix so you can check your backup status or run backups. I have Comwin that comes with the 4000 and the techs all use that to get into 9006 instead of ProComm, but I haven't mastered the trick of getting it to connect yet. Also in 6.6 there are some new web-based tools you can use by hitting the IP of the switch if it's on the LAN, but the backup in there does not report the results of the regular unix backup so you're still kind of stuck with UBA for now.
The 4000 has it all pretty well put together. I like to use the assistant for a Lot of it, but when I create new stations and add call forwarding and a few other things I do it all in Expert Mode (Direct AMO). You can write macros to to a whole lot of stuff, and it really speeds it up. if I'm adding a department with 20 of the same type of phone I can take one line of code, copy it 20 times, change the extensions and PEN numbers, hit run and *poof* there are my 20 stations. If you save that for the next time it goes even faster. I have similar scripts for adding call forwarding, names, and other repetitive functions. Then when I have them all created I go into Assistant and tweak them the way I want. Plus there is one common interface for everything, and I don't have to try to teach my backup techs 3 different flavors of LC-Win, plus ProComm!
LC-Win is a tool that is nice to work with in v4.0 where they finally got the functionality pretty useful, but like all tools, one size doesn't fit all, and I still spend a lot of time in DAD. Taking the check mark out of "In Service", hitting OK, then going back and putting it back in and hitting OK again is not the same as DEA-DSSU and ACT-DSSU when a station is in DEFIL, and you can't even tell that's the case without SDSU. Plus LC-Win will not allow some of the basic changes to a station in a hunt group, and it whines, where all you do is drop into DAD and run the command and it works just fine...
The other thing that sucks is still needing to use ProComm to get into unix so you can check your backup status or run backups. I have Comwin that comes with the 4000 and the techs all use that to get into 9006 instead of ProComm, but I haven't mastered the trick of getting it to connect yet. Also in 6.6 there are some new web-based tools you can use by hitting the IP of the switch if it's on the LAN, but the backup in there does not report the results of the regular unix backup so you're still kind of stuck with UBA for now.
The 4000 has it all pretty well put together. I like to use the assistant for a Lot of it, but when I create new stations and add call forwarding and a few other things I do it all in Expert Mode (Direct AMO). You can write macros to to a whole lot of stuff, and it really speeds it up. if I'm adding a department with 20 of the same type of phone I can take one line of code, copy it 20 times, change the extensions and PEN numbers, hit run and *poof* there are my 20 stations. If you save that for the next time it goes even faster. I have similar scripts for adding call forwarding, names, and other repetitive functions. Then when I have them all created I go into Assistant and tweak them the way I want. Plus there is one common interface for everything, and I don't have to try to teach my backup techs 3 different flavors of LC-Win, plus ProComm!
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- #6
That's good the 4000 gives you options to still use commands and scripts. Didn't have much experience with that system or Comwin. I also use DOS for some small batch files at home to backup files on another pc or flash drive. I hate Windows 8, unfortunately that's what my laptop is, at least cmd.exe is still there. Also use that with a script for doing backups of RF phone systems via ftp. Surprisingly, Procomm does work with Windows 8. I have login scripts and a SONUS script modified as required with the future dates/times to update daylight savings if building a new hard drive. I went to 9006 training in 1995. I think 9006.3 had just been released. It was a big deal having UBA, before that you'd have to do a backup manually, starting by formatting the tape with STA-TINIT. Maybe that was only the case with 9006.1, or i.
UBA was in 6.2 for backup, but you still had to use STA-TINIT if you had a brand new tape to format it before you could use it. I think when I got my EMML training in summer of 96 we were at 6.4, but it's possible I had 6.3 then and went to 6.4 in 1998 when I added an SLMN card to do videoconferencing in our new addition. I know I went to 6.6 (at main site) in 2007 when I rolled out Intellidesk consoles. Most of my other 5 sites came in at 6.4 or higher. I kind of hated 6.5 because they forced you to use LC-Win, but it really wasn't all that useful yet, and I missed my %CHASTN script because it was a lot faster than LC-Win. When LC-Win 4 came out they gave you the "Change Device Type" option and then I was pretty much back happy again.
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