km@emory.UUCP (Ken Mandelberg) (11/11/84)
We are about to add our third Vax. One runs VMS and the other two will run 4.2BSD. Until now (with just two Vaxen) we handled tape drives by just dual porting them. With 3 Vaxen the issue is more complicated. Adding another good tape drive is expensive, and dual porting will not handle peek needs and breakdowns in any optimal way. What comes to mind is some scheme for putting all the drives on an ethernet. However, to be useful to us this must work for both Unix and VMS. Also one vax should not expend any resources on the others to access the drives (or for that matter require any of the other Vaxen to be up). I guess what I am fishing for is a tape server that talks to all the tape drives (a variety of fancy DEC drives), and uses the ethernet to talk to the Vaxen, together with hardware/software on the Vaxen that make it look like the drives are local. Any suggestions? (We run EUNICE on the VMS VAX, but a solution that exploits this is not likely to be sufficiently dependable. A Unix only solution would be better than nothing.) -- Ken Mandelberg Emory University Dept of Math and CS Atlanta, Ga 30322 {akgua,sb1,gatech}!emory!km USENET km@emory CSNET km.emory@csnet-relay ARPANET