[net.periphs] Help needed to combinine HD Units from two XTs

mob@mit-amt.MIT.EDU (Mario O. Bourgoin) (10/20/86)

Hello,
	A while back, I posted an  article about controlling  two hard
disks from  an XT's Xebec controller   card. Thanks for   all the kind
replies; it is perfectly possible to do this and I now know  how.  The
problem that this was  supposed to solve  hasn't gone away  though, so
I'm back with more questions.

Background:
	I'm part of  a project  which uses IBM  XTs and PCJrs, the IBM
Cluster and Network hardware and Novell NetWare to provide  networking
capabilities for PCJrs in an elementary school. The system  clusters a
set of PCJrs around an  XT server and  the XTs  are networked together
using bridges.

Situation:
	We need extra storage space. The kids share the  use of the XT
server's  hard disk and  have managed  to almost fill  up  most of the
space available  on  them.  The bridges  that   network   the  XTs are
themselves XTs  since  we had nothing  else  to use  for this purpose;
these XT's hard disks are sitting unused.

Problem:
	We need to control the bridge's hard disks from the server.

Constraints:
	- We don't have money to buy other equipment.
	- We don't have expansion boxes for XTs.
	- An XT server can't be a bridge computer; a bridge computer
	  can't be an XT server.
	- The XT servers need to retain use of their floppy drives
	  since they are used to run system maintenance software.
	- The XT bridges need to retain use of their floppy drives
	  since they are used to load the bridge software.

Please help.

--Mario O. Bourgoin