Hi Duncan!

In message <97Jan13.161348gmt.36868@oswald.worc.ac.uk>
          "Duncan Ferguson" <d.ferguson@worc.ac.uk> wrote:

> Thanks for your help - it seems to be the best bet to go for a Cumana
> SCSI 2 card with a Quantum Atlas II 9gb.
> 
> Now to persuade people to spend the money...

No, please please don't reward the company which has shown the worst attitude
towards the RiscBSD community by buying one of their products for use under
RiscBSD!
They said they were reconsidering the NDA half a year ago and haven't been
able to get it decided since.
The mail I sent them more than three weeks ago is still unanswered.

Believe me, this NDA will also bother you as it has done for me ever since I
got involved in RiscBSD. You will most probably want/have to compile kernels
yourself if you're going to use RiscBSD for a news server. To increase the
size of a buffer, get the latest bugfix, whatever.
I don't know if you've read our recent discussion about the problems to get a
working kernel for Cumana compiled. To make it short, because of the NDA it
took three to four weeks to get everything sorted out to get a kernel
compiled with the ibuf overflow problem fixed.
It's not the first time we needed a new object file for the driver and surely
won't be the last one. It always took some extra work for everybody, Mark to
put it on the ftp server, us to write a mail, patch files.arm32 whenever it's
changed...
[Intonation of Bundy-children when they say this] Thank you Cumana!
Yes I am angry now.
Yes I would never ever buy a Cumana card now because of the NDA (the rest is
fine about this card).

If you have to decide whether to take Powertec or Cumana please go for
Powertec, they have provided the information without NDA so the driver comes
with the source tree like any other file.

Please consider this,

Markus