My sun3 has one db50-hd50 cable for the primary cpu-to-drives
run.  Sadly, it is 5 feet long.  The boxes used are now 4 x sun411
lunchbox drives (shortly to be upddated to a 911 box with 4 drives).
Originally, I could only get a maximum of 3 drives interconnected
with two 8 '' hd50 ribbon cables (special things I had made up).
The original terminator was a passive hd50 kind, which, as it turns
out, seems to be the culprit.  I replaced it with a DEC active scsi
terminator from an Alpha 7000 machine that I scrapped a while back,
and that seems to have cured the problem.  Now, the cable length
is 5 feet + (5x4" box cables) + (4x8" cables) = 112" (9'4"), which is
working.  I have not tried to add an additional cdrom and its cable
(12" total), although I am expecting that should work.  In my particular
case, it appears that the terminator block was the culprit.  The 3/60
is now up on sunos 4.1.1U1, and hopefully will provide me a platform
to boot one of the drives in NetBSD and get up to current on that.

This kind of trouble caused me to wring my type 3 keyboards in the
air, one time, and chuck out a truckload of sun3 vme crates.  But,
when I ran across this lonely, forgotten 3/60, I got bit by that sunbug,
again.....(:+}}..... (as it turns out this particular 3/60 had the good 3.0.1
prom in it so I can run the luncbox 150mb tape drives, which is nice).

Anyone know if there is a way to rebuild the cpu board to have either
a Centronics style output or an HD50 output plug instead of that 
awful db50 thing?  I was thinking it might be possible to header off
the internal unused 50 pin scsi dip thingy with say the cable out of
a 411 box.  That would provide the hd50 output to make things a bit
more happy.

Thanks for the discussion and noggin'-scratchin'...(:+}}.....

Bob Keys