SUMMARY: E3000 SCSI

From: David N. Edwards (davee@lightning.mitre.org)
Date: Wed Oct 01 1997 - 11:12:45 CDT


Greetings,

     Thank you to all who replied to my question (see below)!

     Briefly, I wanted to know whether it was possible to use external SCSI
devices connected to the built-in SCSI port of the first I/O card of a Sun
Enterprise 3000. Replies from people on the list ran about 40% "No Problem,"
vs. 60% "Can't do it." The reply from our Sun engineer was that the port was
physically disconnected :-<. Of course, it's not, or the E3000 hardware
manual would not require that you install the included 68-pin terminator!

     First, our config.: Enterprise 3000 w/ 2 CPU boards, 4 250MHz CPUs,
512MB RAM, 1 I/O board (with a cgsix, 1 DWIS controller, 1 SWIS controller,
and one fibre-channel controller), internal CD-ROM and internal DDS-3 DAT,
no internal disks, running Solaris 2.6.

     To this, we connected an older desktop 8500 8mm tape drive, via a 68-50
pin SCSI adapter and a 4M (yes, over 12-feet long) cable to the built-in
SCSI controller on I/O board 1. The 8mm was terminated with a 50-pin regulated
Sun terminator. Then we started some nice ufsdumps to the internal DAT drive,
while sending other info. to the external 8mm.

     Result? No problems at all, even with both tape drives running
simultaneously. Obviously, a shorter SCSI cable will be in order for a more
permanent solution, and note that we had *no* internal disks on that SCSI
bus, but the (normally-terminated) built-in SCSI port on the E3000 is not only
live, but can be quite useful!

     Thanks again to:

Karen Barrett, Steve Butterfield (in the U.K.!), Virginia Coffindaffer,
Bern Fox, Manuel Gil, gjames1@csc.com, Jim Harmon, Brion Leary, Kenn Owen,
Joe Pruett, Rahul Roy, tkittrel@basspro.com, Ray Trzaska, and Jeff Wasilko.

Regards,

Dave Edwards
davee@mitre.org



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