What parts should be stocked for self maintenance?

[Wayne Little]

The purpose of this letter is to determine what parts one should keep in
stock when doing one's own hardware maintenance and repair.

We are on are own for hardware support for our individual Sun
workstations.  We figured we could buy about buy a spare ss1/year with the
$$ we saved (in fact I'm using the 'spare' one as its on my desk :-) ).
We do have our "main" dept. server system on hardware maintenance - its a
Solbourne.

Our idea is to use depot-repair if we can't fix it ourselves, and have a
backup of "critical components" to prevent down time during repair (or
costly quick-swap/repair service).

>From our experience, we are going to keep a spare of at least:
1. 19" monochrome monitor (see following posting specific to monitors)
2. keyboard
3. keyboard cable 
4. a 1MB simm (no problems yet, but they're cheap...)

My questions are -

1. Are failure rates for sun components available?  If so where?

2. What high-frequency failure items should one consider stocking?  i.e.
   in your experience, any significant multi-failures at your site?  (if so,
   plz. include source info - part #, cost, vendor, phone, etc.)

3. Any hardware repair vendors you do/don't recommend?

Please e-mail to me & I'll summarize this back to the list.

Wayne Little      Internet: rwl at ee.umr.edu      Phone: (314) 341-4546  
USPS: Univ. of Missouri-Rolla, EE Dept., Rolla, MO 65401