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.

The idea is to transform one of the 3000 stations into a server that can mount
ZIP disks and export them via NFS, and that is running saned so that the DEC
Unix clients can access the scanner with the sane client. We know that all this
is possible with Linux (I am using a setup like this at home on a UDB Multia),
only that Linux does not run on the 3000 stations because of TurboChannel (?),
and we do not want to sacrifice one of the fast 500au boxes for this task. So I
took on the chance to promote the BSD platform and suggested to install NetBSD
on one of those stations :-).

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?).

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?

Kind regards,
Tobias.