ballen@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Bruce Allen) (03/24/91)
Thanks for those of you who responded to my request for information about the SS2 upgrade that I have received, and for suggestions regarding the Wren V drive. Here is what I have learned: 1. Upgrade only requires you to send back chassis and memory. You get to keep extra keyboard/mouse/documentation/spare connectors. 2. The load resistor in the place of one internal disk can be removed if you have a frame buffer card. This resistor is only needed if you are running as a "compute server", ie diskless and frame-buffer-less, with minimum memory. 3. The second internal fan can be disconnected if you have no internal drives. 4. If you don't return the NVRAM chip, Sun will be angry. (But could someone please tell me if this SS1 chip works in the SS2?? This way you keep your hostid.) 5. OK, disk drives. The SS2 runs faster than the SS1. This makes SCSI bus timing more critical. The HP drives work fine on either SS1 or SS2. The Fujitsu 2263S works OK on either SS1 or SS2. The Fujitsu 2266 NEEDS A FIRMWARE UPGRADE FROM FUJITSU; contact them or your vendor. The Wren V (and presumably IV,VI,VII) does not appear to work correctly on the SS2 although it is perfectly OK on the SS1, SS1+ and IPC, both in asynch and synch mode. My vendor has spoken with his technical liason at Seagate/CDC and they are going to try to test some of these drives on an SS2 next week, to determine what is wrong. My Wren V, which does not work on the SS2, was made in 1989 and is serial number 035620 model number 94181-702 lot number O-02-8921-1. The drive works perfectly on a SS1 and IPC running 4.0.3 and 4.1 with the kernel patched into synch mode. On the SS2 one can read the label using the probe-scsi command, but one gets continual error messages saying "esp0: SCSI bus MESSAGE IN phase parity error" repeating over and over. Jumpering parity on actually makes things worse; it changes the word "IN" to "OUT" in the above error message, and makes the disk label unreadable. My short-term solution was to take the Fujitsu 2263 off my IPC at home and swap it for the Wren V on my SS2 at work. After only ten wonderful hours of backing everything up and getting the #$#%@ing networking set back up, everything seems to be working fine. And the SS2 is exactly a factor of two faster at my favorite numerical simulation (and might be better if I recompile everything) so it was worth the hassle. I would be interested in any further news concerning Wren V's on SS2's. Bruce Allen Department of Physics University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee ballen@dirac.phys.uwm.edu
gmd@uunet.uu.net (George MacDonald) (04/18/91)
In article <2138@brchh104.bnr.ca> ballen@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Bruce Allen) writes: >5. OK, disk drives. The SS2 runs faster than the SS1. This makes SCSI > bus timing more critical. The HP drives work fine on either SS1 or SS2. > The Fujitsu 2263S works OK on either SS1 or SS2. The Fujitsu 2266 NEEDS A > FIRMWARE UPGRADE FROM FUJITSU; contact them or your vendor. The Wren V > (and presumably IV,VI,VII) does not appear to work correctly on the SS2 > although it is perfectly OK on the SS1, SS1+ and IPC, both in asynch and > synch mode. I just setup a sparc II with an external Wren IV last week, so far it's been running fine. Format reveals AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS: 0. sd0 at esp0 slave 24 sd0: <SUN0207 cyl 1254 alt 2 hd 9 sec 36> 1. sd1 at esp0 slave 8 sd1: <CDC Wren IV 94171-344 cyl 1545 alt 2 hd 9 sec 46> I have done several large tree copies on/off this disk, got it remotely mounted and so far all seems fine. Don't have the model/rev numbers handy, but the drive is at least a year old. George MacDonald Network Administrator uunet!pictel!gmd