sutton@luke (John Sutton) (07/17/90)
Some time ago we (sun-spots) had a short discussion on a problem with the Conner CP3200, 200 Mbyte, 3.5 inch SCSI disk and SparcStations running SunOS 4.1. These drives worked okay with 4.0.3 but not with 4.1. There was also some grumbling about Sun, support, and openness. I would like to relate how this problem is being resolved. It turns out that Conner has finally agreed to upgrade our drives to the newest version which appears to work correctly with 4.1 on SparcStations. This occurred only after some folks in Sun took an interest in the problem and made contact with Conner. There was considerable effort on the part of the SCSI expert at Sun to understand and straighten out this problem, including spending his own personnel time on it. I was not until after he started working with Conner that it was discovered that their newer version of the drive worked correctly. Unfortunately, our drive supplier was unable to get this kind of support and information from Conner. The Sun SCSI expert was willing to take the responsibility to determine what the problem was and do what ever was appropriate to fix it. Many times we complain because Sun does not make everything work as we think it should. That does not necessarily mean they aren't interested, but that they are significantly limited in what battles they have time and resources to tackle. I believe that this experience shows that the spirit of openness is alive in Sun and that some Sun employees are willing to commit their time and effort to it. If you have Conner drives and plan to use them on SparcStations running 4.1 make sure that the firmware label is NOT RS16 001.86. Drives with the firmware label RS16 RS2.03 work properly. Unfortunately, the entire PC board must be replaced, as a prom change only does not fix them problem. I offer my thanks to the following people for helping resolve this problem: Matt Jacob (Sun) Lew Yobs (Sun) Alayne Gyetvai (Sun) Joe Scandore (Sun) Steve O'Sullivan (Falcon) and several others who passed information to the right people in sun but whos name I don't have. John Sutton jggs@lanl.gov (505) 667-3623 or sutton@luke.lanl.gov Los Alamos Nat'l Lab