On Tue, Jun 29, 1999 at 11:42:26PM +0200, Tobias Ernst wrote:
> Hallo!
> 
> We are administering a computer lab of 17 500au and 12 DECstation 3000
> workstations running DEC Unix 4.0e. Unfortunately, DEC Unix does not support
> two things that we require. The one is attaching a scanner, probably with sane
> - DEC Unix simply does not have the generic SCSI device driver. The other is
> mounting ZIP disks with FAT/VFAT. We can only use mtools, but they show some
> severe bugs on that platform.

What kind of bugs? I notice that the mtools in pkgsrc doesn't have
any platforms marked as NOT_FOR_ARCH...

> The question is if the NetBSD kernel has support for mounting FAT/VFAT
> partitions (including long file names with VFAT, that would be important), if
> this will work on the DEC 3000 station with a SCSI ZIP drive, and if sane will
> run on NetBSD and be able to use the 3000 SCSI interface (whatever that is - is
> it a NCR like in the Multia?).

For FAT/VFAT, yes, see mount_msdos(8), I don't know the DEC 3000,
but the NCR sounds familiar, maybe you could post the dmesg
output from bootup if you have any troubles with it.
Lots of people are using SCSI ZIPs, shouldn't be a problem.

> If it is possible, I would give it a try next weekend. Which NetBSD release
> should I take? Simply the latest stable one, or are there special
> considerations?

1.4 is the latest stable. Someone on the Alpha side of things could
probably comment whether there have been any changes since then
that you might find significant. The upgrade is fairly
straightforward if you choose to do it anyway, so 1.4
is a good place to start.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
Any sufficiently advanced Common Sense will seem like magic... 
					      - me