[rescue] Sparc20, Linux, CDRAX7-H2

[Wes Will]

Greetings.

It's definitely rescued hardware, so should be topic-friendly for this
list.  The original manufacturers are surprised that it's still seen to be
possibly useful gear.  But the procom people have been about as helpful
with this out-dated piece of hardware as the proverbial rubber crutch in
the amputation ward.

For basically the cost of shipping (plus a measley $11) I got a full rack
of 7 CD's in a rackmount box, complete with the procom controller board,
both power supplies, two hard disks for caching and control, I guess.  One
of the controller hard disks was toast; the hardware has been replaced but
whatever software or firmware was on it is missing.  That needs to be
addressed, or maybe somebody can boost an image off of a working one if
that would be legal?  I've tried getting info from procom, but they just
want me to buy a new system (at full retail of course...).

This was apparently attached to some sort of dedicated cdrom controller
computer, but since the thing seems to be just a LUN generator for the
installed disks, it should be amenable to being connected to a normal SCSI
bus, nichts wahr?

Anybody ever used this stuff, or had any luck with this equipment? I'm
using Linux, but if you know anything about it under Solaris instead that
might give me a clue or a starting point.  Would anyone have any ideas
about just bypassing the internal caching controller and allowing it to
appear as several ID's as in a standard SCSI install?  I have the ID space,
that's not an issue here, so I'm considering that as a serious option.  I'd
like to keep the hot-swap capability, but that's even optional when it
comes down to this either working without hot-swap or not working at all.

Clues cheerfully accepted.
Smackdowns re-routed just as cheerfully to /dev/null .
--
Wes Will
Help Desk, SIUC
Welcome to my nightmare.