As noted in Bradley Hale's post on 21 July, the new version of MCP
Express, 6.0, has been released. I am pleased that Unisys released this
a little earlier this year, giving us some overlap between the expiring
and new versions.

6.0 is still MCP 18. In fact it's exactly the same as 5.0 from last year
except for a new license expiration date, 31 July 2021.

Alas, 6.0 also has the same problem with Windows blue-screen crashes as
5.0 when running on Windows 10 releases after 1803. The error on the
blue screen is "IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL" and references "Janus.sys", which
is part of the MCP networking firmware.

It appears, however, that we now have a workaround that either
eliminates these crashes or reduces their frequency to the point where I haven't suffered one since using the workaround.

The workaround is entirely procedural, and pretty simple:

1. After booting Windows 10, allow it to fully initialize and settle
down. Depending on your system, this may take 5-10 minutes or so.

2. Once Windows stabilizes, start the MCP firmware services from the
system tray icon, as described on page 3-1 of the MCP Express Getting
Started Guide.

3. Wait for the firmware services to completely initialize and settle
down. This should only take a few minutes.

4. Then start the MCP Console application and load the MCP.

5. It seems to help to shut down the MCP firmware services from the
system tray icon -- and waiting for them to completely stop -- before
shutting down Windows.

6. If you do suffer a blue-screen crash:

a. After Windows reboots to recover after the crash, manually reboot
Windows again. It appears that there's some sort of cruft left
around after the automatic reboot, and rebooting again seems to
clear this out.

b. Try extending the time between steps 1-4 a little more. It may
take some experimentation to determine how long it takes things
to "settle down" on your system. Patience is very much a virtue
here.

Thanks to Jim Camelford of Toronto, Ontario, for discovering this
procedure and telling me about it.



Before installing 6.0, I upgraded the laptop I use for MCP Express to
Windows 10 release 2004. Initially, the crash behavior was the worst I
had ever seen, but after trying this procedure, the MCP has now been
running for over 24 hours. I have tried a wide variety of networking activities, both across the EVLAN and on an external network, and all
have worked.

We have only been using this workaround for a couple of days, so there
may be other issues we haven't seen yet. I would appreciate anyone who
tries this to report their experience with it, good or bad.

I am working on a new post for the unite.org MCP Insider blog that
describes my experience installing 6.0 and how to deal with the Logical
Disk image backup I mentioned in last week's blog post. I hope to have
that published by this weekend:

https://unite.org/wp/category/mcp-insider/

--
Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Le vendredi 24 juillet 2020 à 02:21:10 UTC+2, Paul Kimpel a écrit :

As noted in Bradley Hale's post on 21 July, the new version of MCP
Express, 6.0, has been released. I am pleased that Unisys released this
a little earlier this year, giving us some overlap between the expiring
and new versions.

6.0 is still MCP 18. In fact it's exactly the same as 5.0 from last year except for a new license expiration date, 31 July 2021.

Alas, 6.0 also has the same problem with Windows blue-screen crashes as
5.0 when running on Windows 10 releases after 1803. The error on the
blue screen is "IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL" and references "Janus.sys", which
is part of the MCP networking firmware.

It appears, however, that we now have a workaround that either
eliminates these crashes or reduces their frequency to the point where I haven't suffered one since using the workaround.

The workaround is entirely procedural, and pretty simple:

1. After booting Windows 10, allow it to fully initialize and settle
down. Depending on your system, this may take 5-10 minutes or so.

2. Once Windows stabilizes, start the MCP firmware services from the
system tray icon, as described on page 3-1 of the MCP Express Getting Started Guide.

3. Wait for the firmware services to completely initialize and settle
down. This should only take a few minutes.

4. Then start the MCP Console application and load the MCP.

5. It seems to help to shut down the MCP firmware services from the
system tray icon -- and waiting for them to completely stop -- before shutting down Windows.

6. If you do suffer a blue-screen crash:

a. After Windows reboots to recover after the crash, manually reboot
Windows again. It appears that there's some sort of cruft left
around after the automatic reboot, and rebooting again seems to
clear this out.

b. Try extending the time between steps 1-4 a little more. It may
take some experimentation to determine how long it takes things
to "settle down" on your system. Patience is very much a virtue
here.

Thanks to Jim Camelford of Toronto, Ontario, for discovering this
procedure and telling me about it.

Before installing 6.0, I upgraded the laptop I use for MCP Express to Windows 10 release 2004. Initially, the crash behavior was the worst I
had ever seen, but after trying this procedure, the MCP has now been
running for over 24 hours. I have tried a wide variety of networking activities, both across the EVLAN and on an external network, and all
have worked.

We have only been using this workaround for a couple of days, so there
may be other issues we haven't seen yet. I would appreciate anyone who
tries this to report their experience with it, good or bad.

I am working on a new post for the unite.org MCP Insider blog that
describes my experience installing 6.0 and how to deal with the Logical
Disk image backup I mentioned in last week's blog post. I hope to have
that published by this weekend:

https://unite.org/wp/category/mcp-insider/

--
Paul

Sorry to inform you but I'am still facing the crash despite spending hours to wait for the system to be settled...
between windows and the firmware services...
I am currently running Windows 10 version 2004.
System crash sometimes just after end of MCP and network initialization or sometimes 10 to 30 minutes later...
Any help would be appriciated.... if any...

Thank you Paul for you blog that is so clear for installing MCP XE...

Antoine Temime
Ancient MCPuser and still passionate....

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 8/23/2020 1:50 AM, Antoine Temime wrote:

Le vendredi 24 juillet 2020 à 02:21:10 UTC+2, Paul Kimpel a écrit :

As noted in Bradley Hale's post on 21 July, the new version of MCP
Express, 6.0, has been released. I am pleased that Unisys released this
a little earlier this year, giving us some overlap between the expiring
and new versions.

6.0 is still MCP 18. In fact it's exactly the same as 5.0 from last year
except for a new license expiration date, 31 July 2021.

Alas, 6.0 also has the same problem with Windows blue-screen crashes as
5.0 when running on Windows 10 releases after 1803. The error on the
blue screen is "IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL" and references "Janus.sys", which
is part of the MCP networking firmware.

It appears, however, that we now have a workaround that either
eliminates these crashes or reduces their frequency to the point where I
haven't suffered one since using the workaround.

The workaround is entirely procedural, and pretty simple:

1. After booting Windows 10, allow it to fully initialize and settle
down. Depending on your system, this may take 5-10 minutes or so.

2. Once Windows stabilizes, start the MCP firmware services from the
system tray icon, as described on page 3-1 of the MCP Express Getting
Started Guide.

3. Wait for the firmware services to completely initialize and settle
down. This should only take a few minutes.

4. Then start the MCP Console application and load the MCP.

5. It seems to help to shut down the MCP firmware services from the
system tray icon -- and waiting for them to completely stop -- before
shutting down Windows.

6. If you do suffer a blue-screen crash:

a. After Windows reboots to recover after the crash, manually reboot
Windows again. It appears that there's some sort of cruft left
around after the automatic reboot, and rebooting again seems to
clear this out.

b. Try extending the time between steps 1-4 a little more. It may
take some experimentation to determine how long it takes things
to "settle down" on your system. Patience is very much a virtue
here.

Thanks to Jim Camelford of Toronto, Ontario, for discovering this
procedure and telling me about it.



Before installing 6.0, I upgraded the laptop I use for MCP Express to
Windows 10 release 2004. Initially, the crash behavior was the worst I
had ever seen, but after trying this procedure, the MCP has now been
running for over 24 hours. I have tried a wide variety of networking
activities, both across the EVLAN and on an external network, and all
have worked.

We have only been using this workaround for a couple of days, so there
may be other issues we haven't seen yet. I would appreciate anyone who
tries this to report their experience with it, good or bad.

I am working on a new post for the unite.org MCP Insider blog that
describes my experience installing 6.0 and how to deal with the Logical
Disk image backup I mentioned in last week's blog post. I hope to have
that published by this weekend:

https://unite.org/wp/category/mcp-insider/

--
Paul

Sorry to inform you but I'am still facing the crash despite spending hours to wait for the system to be settled...
between windows and the firmware services...
I am currently running Windows 10 version 2004.
System crash sometimes just after end of MCP and network initialization or sometimes 10 to 30 minutes later...
Any help would be appriciated.... if any...

Thank you Paul for you blog that is so clear for installing MCP XE...

Antoine Temime
Ancient MCPuser and still passionate....

Sorry to hear that you are still having problems with network crashes.
Waiting for hours after booting Windows before starting the MCP firmware services should not be necessary. Five minutes works for me.

The other part of the workaround is to wait for the firmware services to
fully initialize. 3-5 minutes has been sufficient on my Windows 10 2004
system.

Methodically shutting down MCP Express seems to help as well. That means halting the MCP, waiting for the system components in MCP Console to go
to Offline status, and then shutting down the firmware services from the
system tray icon.

It also seems to be important to do a second reboot after Windows
reboots after a crash. That appears to clean up some mess left behind by
the crash.

Do you have an external LAN connection configured or are you using just
the internal EVLAN between the MCP and Windows?

The workaround seems to be working for most people, but I have received
a couple of reports from others who are still experiencing problems. It
may be something like a driver incompatibility. Since we don't actually
know what the problem is, it is difficult to say what might be different
about your system that triggers the crash.

This is all I can offer, and hope it will be of some help.

Stay passionate.

Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)