Subject: Re: Supported sbus Fiber Channel cards?
To: Sean J. Schluntz <schluntz@workofstone.com>
From: Brian Hechinger <wonko@4amlunch.net>
List: port-sparc
Date: 09/02/2002 10:15:44
On Sun, Sep 01, 2002 at 10:25:53PM -0700, Sean J. Schluntz wrote:
> 
> I just picked up a SPARCarray 1010 (for those of you who don't know, it's
> a 30 disk rack mount unit which uses wide-se disks but has a FC port
> on the back.)

do you have any links to info on this box?  i'm not familiar with the model 1010
at all, and i can't seem to find anything about it online.

ok, in researching the second answer's availability on ebay i ran across three
of these things on ebay.  i just looks like a model 112 with the skins taken
off to me.  interesting.

> What I'm wondering is this, what sbus fiber channel cards does NetBSD
> 1.6 support? (I know it's not out yet, but new drivers aren't being
> added any more).  I would much rather run NetBSD on this box insted of
> Sol9.

there is only one card you can use with this box.  it uses FC, but not the FC
that is currently in use today.  the FC it uses is old and slow, and was made
by Sun, and is totally proprietary.  (and by slow i mean 25MB/sec per channel)

the card is sun part number 501-2553 (or X1057A in new model numbers) and there
is currently one on ebay for $80, and the seller is a good guy (2050617936)

i do not know if these cards are supported by NetBSD, but if i were to hazzard
a guess, i would assume they are not.

if the above statement is true, fear not.  Solaris has come a long way in the
last couple years, and in particular, Solaris 9 is really rather amazing.  due
to NetBSD's complete lack of SMP in sparc, i run solaris 9 on a lot of hardware
here (ok, i'm also a solaris admin by trade, so that does influence things a
bit *G*) and when i talk about a lot of hardware, i only own one ultra machine,
the rest are all sparc20s.  sol7 was fairly painful on these machines.  sol8
was tolerable.  sol9 rocks.  hard.

the other thing to note, is that each SPARCstorage Array comes with a built-in
Veritas VxVM license, so all you need to do is go to ftp.veritas.com and look
for a downloadable copy of veritas to use to set things up.

cheers!

-brian
-- 
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