friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) (08/17/89)
[ If you know nothing about SCSI on the 3B family, hit "n" now. ]
[ Otherwise please do help us. ]
Hi folks,
A customer has a 3B15 running System V Release 3.1, and we
were exploring disk expansion options for him. AT&T offers a
good 9" SCSI drive from HP for well over $20K, so we figured we
could take a shortcut and roll our own drives for much less. His
system already has the SLIC board, so we got the 3B2 DCM (Disk
Controller Module), which contains an Emulex MD23 SCSI<--->ESDI
controller. We also have an Imprimis (aka CDC, aka Seagate)
776MB ESDI drive and enclosure, and we wired everything up to our
3B2/400. We formatted the drive, and it seemed to operate just
fine.
When we moved the DCM and drives to the 3B15, it still works
but we're not sure if all is OK. It's using the "SD01" driver
(this software came with the DCM), and it recognizes the drive
just fine. The problem is that when we run /etc/prtvtoc, the
second through fourth ESDI taps "show up" as unformatted drives
even though the pins are naked. This is the same cabling we used
for the 3B2 without any problems. We would rather that the
system not even consider these extra drive taps as on the /400.
Next, when I run the SLIC diagnostics from the IAU,
phase 40 fails with
DGN SLIC=0 PH=40 SD_STF TEST=2 RD=d0000009 RD=00000000
Our 3B15 documentation doesn't tell us about this, and we don't
have the diagnostics reference manual. Is this manual worth
getting?
Question: why is the 3B15 thinking that the three empty
ESDI taps are there? Is this a termination problem? What's
the diagnostic failure?
Next area. All the sysadm menus rely on the disk driver's
name being DISKTD instead of SD01. It seems that these two
drivers (both found in /boot) have very similar symbol tables,
and I've successfully run the system with both. I have this
feeling that SD01 is the better driver but that DISKTD is the one
the system wants to use. Has anybody any clue about this stuff?
Once (if) we get this going, I'll post a report on how to
roll your own drives for this. We plan on running a pair of
these 760MB drives -- they format down to about 630MB -- in a
mirroring configuration, and it should all be quite a bit less
than $10K.
Please, if you know about this stuff please send a note.
I'm learning a *lot* about SCSI here but am not all the way
there yet.
Steve
Disclaimer: I very specifically do not speak for V-Systems, they
don't always agree with me, and they usually get nervous when I
post at all. They are not responsible for me.
--
Stephen J. Friedl / V-Systems, Inc. / Santa Ana, CA / +1 714 545 6442
3B2-kind-of-guy / {attmail uunet}!vsi!{bang!}friedl / friedl@vsi.com
"My new bestseller, _Teach_Yourself_to_Read_, is now available everywhere" -me