Subject: RE: SCSI network
To: Roger Brooks <R.S.Brooks@liverpool.ac.uk>
From: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 10/01/1999 09:38:36
On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Roger Brooks wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Yubyub Bird wrote:
> 
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: der Mouse [mailto:mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA]
> >> Sent: Friday, October 01, 1999 2:09 AM
> >> To: tech-kern@netbsd.org
> >> Subject: SCSI network
> >>
> >>
> >> I'm contemplating using SCSI interfaces as a networking medium.  Does
> >> anyone have any thoughts on where I should look for (a) convincing a
> >> machine that it should speak on other than ID 7
> >
> >And a second question: a year or two ago, I was working at a place where
> >they had bunches of Sequent machines.  These machines could share disk packs
> >connected only via scsi - no proprietary busses AFAIK.  Each machine was
> >able to mount the same volume read/write.  What would be involved in doing
> >this?  Is this just a filesystem feature, or is there a more complicated
> >SCSI locking protocol which takes place?
> 
> Take a look at http://www.globalfilesystem.org, which is a filesystem
> which can be shared between two (or more?) Linux hosts on the same SCSI
> bus.  It uses SCSI-3 features to store metadata locks in the RAM in each

Not approved by the comittee yet, and they also are moving to more of a
distributed lock manager model.

> disk, and the locks time out (so the filesystem doesn't hang if the host
> holding a lock suddenly goes away).  Although this is being developed
> under Linux, they're talking about porting it to other systems (including
> *BSD) once it's reasonably stable.

It's in early stages for FreeBSD. NASA/Ames is partially involved with all
of this.

> 
> 
> Roger
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Roger Brooks (Systems Programmer),          |  Email: R.S.Brooks@liv.ac.uk
> Computing Services Dept,                    |  Tel:   +44 151 794 4441
> The University of Liverpool,                |  Fax:   +44 151 794 4442
> PO Box 147, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK           | 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>