Jon Lindgren drunkenly mumbled...
> 
> > Not sure about this one in particular, but RAID enclosures I've seen
> > simply emulate a single disk to the SCSI bus - plug it in and the OS
> > should see it fine.
> 
> This is my experience as well.

i've gone both ways on this.  some stuff just works out of the box, but only
because it was configured by the company/VAR before shipping.  i think this
box falls in the "too simple to need a configuration" class of machines.  it's
strictly RAID5 (doesn't do anything else) and of a _very_ simple (and elegant)
design, so it's chances of Just Working(TM) are fairly high.  the only thing
that really concerns me is that each channel has 10 drive slots (on an 8-bit
narrow SCSI bus) so i'm assuming two are hot swap bays, _OR_ there could be
two channels per controller and it's split up 5+5.  i'd have to haul one of
the drive boxes in the house and look at it a little closer first.

> A number of units I've worked with have a serial port of sorts (usu. just
> a 4 pin berg strip with RX, TX, DCD and ground...) which you can do out of
> band management from. You might scour the unit and get lucky with some
> silkscreened connectors, but connect at your own risk ;-)

there is nothing obvious for out-of-band managment, and after looking at the
"controller" a little closer last night it looks like there are 4 seperate
units in there for each row of drives, and they are not interconnected, so i
think in essense it's 4 RAID boxes in one.  to get the thing fully populated
and hooked up to a single host is going to take 4 SCSI hosts.  i really need
to get good pictures of this thing and get it on the net, it's really one of
the best hardware designs i've ever seen.  super-rediculously redundant, just
really well built.

i'm not getting anywhere near this thing with a soldering iron, i think it's
far too nice looking for me to risk destroying (things that i have poked at
with a soldering iron tend to stop working for some reason that i can't figure
out. *G*)

thanks for the suggestions, i'll post a url and some updates about the status
of the pics once i get everything up on the web server.  the drive boxes are
in the back of the storage locker under some stuff (and very not light) so it
may take a couple of days until i get around to pulling one out.  the controller
is sitting in my living room right now (which pleases my wife tremendously)
so i'll get some pics of that tonight anyway.

thanks again for all the OT help.

-brian