[rescue] IBM PS/2 9595

[vance at neurotica.com]

First, let me say that I know more than you want to know about these
things.  I have a lot of experience with them.

On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Steve Sandau wrote:

> I asked earlier if this was worth fiddling with. I decided it was...
> Forty pounds worth of 486 MCA bus server...

They can be much more than 40 pounds.  Many MCA cards are heavy multilayer
boards.  Plus it holds more than four drives.

> I found the reference and diag diskettes, put the special partition on
> the 1G SCSI I had kicking around, and actually loaded an OS. (Well, only
> DOS, but it *does* boot.) I also found an old Sony CDU-55 (I think) 2x
> SCSI CDROM for it...
>
> I'm actually pretty impressed with this thing. For it's age, it is
> pretty advanced. It appears that I can boot from a CD (it's a choice
> anyway) and the diags are pretty thorough. Has a PS/2 kb and mouse (I
> guess that should be a "duh!") and a power supply big enough for at
> least a couple of computers.

Indeed.

> There's room for several good-sized SCSI drives, so I think this may
> abecome a home for some of my old drives and provide some network
> storage or something...

I use one of the later ones with two parallel ports and two SCSI busses as
a print server for various printers.  It runs Linux/MCA (NetBSD isn't
stable enough yet for my purposes).

> Any ideas on what OS I'd be happy with? I've not had any luck booting
> NetBSD on it even though it is supposedly supported. Is OS/2 around
> still in any form?

If you want to run NetBSD, you need one of the supported disk subsystems.
This is either an IBM MCA ESDI (slow), or an Adaptec 1640K (faster).  The
IBM cards are yet faster, but they aren't supported yet.

> Other interesting thing is that I'll either need a MCA ethernet card, or
> I'll need to set up a token ring network. I have an RS6K 6611 router
> with token ring, so I may be masochistic enough to to the ring thing...

If you want 10Mbps ethernet, I have a bunch I can spare cheap.  I also
have 100Mbps cards new in box for $50.

Peace...  Sridhar