On Thu, 15 Feb 96 10:13:44 PST 
 jgraham@defender.VAS.viewlogic.com (James Graham - Systems Anarchist) wrote:

[ I'm not trying to be rude, but I get really frustrated with the "my
  SPARCstation SCSI doesn't work" messages that contain flamage and
  no other helpful/useful information. ]

 > I must concur.  My NetBSD/sparc 1+ can't do JACK with a tape drive.

While I sympathize that your tape drive might not be working properly, I 
just have to ask "Then why haven't you helped Paul, et al find the bloody 
bug?"  If any of my SPARC systems had this problem (SS1 and SS2 systems 
at work, 4/260 at home; different SCSI controller), then I would 
certainly try to help.  I'm sure Paul would too.  Or anyone else that 
might know how to fix it.  But, if we can't reproduce the problem on our 
end, then it's REALLY difficult to fix it.  You could certainly turn on 
SCSIDEBUG and/or litter esp.c with printf()s and calls to Debugger() at 
the failure points.  Also, saying "SS1+" doesn't provide enough info.  
There are a b'zillion different flavors of the NCR53c94 (the SCSI chip 
used in the SPARCstation).  Which revision is it?  Note, "ESP100A" might 
not be enough.  I have an SS1 with an "ESP100A" in it, which has an 
Emulex version of the chip, and my SS2 with an "ESP100A" has a genuine 
NCR chip.

Simply saying "My NetBSD/sparc 1+ can't do JACK with a tape drive" isn't 
going to help anyone solve the problem.  Details do.

 > Where the _hell_ is the st support?  And a properly working 'mt'?
 > They've been missing WAY too long!  I want to be able to back my
 > machine up to a LOCAL tape drive (some of us can't afford more than one
 > machine -- should we be punished?).

"st" support and a working "mt" have been here a long time!  Because they 
fail on some revisions of a SCSI controller chip doesn't mean that 
overall support is broken.

So, to re-cap: my tapes/cdroms work, other people's do, too.  Yours, and 
some others', doesn't.  Please help those who are brave enough to hack on 
the SCSI code find the bug by providing some useful "mode of failure" 
information; you might be surprised at the results.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
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