[rescue] 670MP outfitting....

[Dave McGuire]

On August 27, BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak wrote:
> 1. I was thinking of adding one or two 150mb 18-track tape transports,
>    half height, to it, plus my outboard Cipher 9-track reel deck.
>    Are there any constraints I need to be aware of, ahead of time, in
>    doing this on a 670MP or SunOS-4.1.3U1?

  You may need to do up a new kernel config for those tape drives.  The
tape device drivers are hard-set to certain SCSI IDs in SunOS4's
default kernel configs and you may need to override them.  Feel free
to contact me if you need assistance with this.

> 2. The internal scsi cable has 6 connectors (two full height at the back
>    and 4 half or 2 full height at the front) on the drive sled assembly.
>    If I want to load the thing up, reasonably, with 6 devices internally
>    plus the old reel tape, externally, are there any constraints I need
>    to be aware of, ahead of time, regarding cable runs or bus loading
>    that could be problematic?  I have never had good luck on older VME
>    SUNthings driving a heavily loaded scsi bus, but the 4/600 cpu seems
>    to have more driving power, and the cabling is much better than on
>    the old crates.

  Keep in mind that the 4/600 is a much newer machine than the other
4-series boxes.  It's more Sun4m than Sun4, and is much better in
all respects.

> 3. In SunOS-4.1.3U1, are there any drive or file system sizing issues
>    that I need to be aware of?  I was thinking it had 2g fs max sizes,
>    but I did not remember the max drive sizes associated with that OS
>    revision.

  2gb filesystem size limit, unless you install ODS.  I don't know of
any max drive sizes.  The largest drive I've used under SunOS4 is 9gb.

      -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Laurel, MD