Friday, October 26, 2007

Macintosh software

XStrimmer - trim universal binaries & other languages from apps
Macports - Free software for Mac. was darwinports

More SCSI issues

I got another card with an LSI 53c895. It should be supported by the glm driver in 64 bit solaris. *sigh* Nope.

So now, I've got the Adaptec 2940au in the Linux box. It's seen but not the tape drive. I have a 2940U2 card to try also.

When did SCSI get difficult?

Friday, October 19, 2007

Solaris 10 x86 SCSI cards

I just got a cast off DLT 7000 drive to put in my Solaris x86 box. I've had SCSI on most of my systems dating back to a 286 with an Adaptec 1542b card. I ran Minix and DOS at the time with a Syquest 88MB drive. I often used that drive on Macintosh at a nearby college to download from simtel20.

Later I got a 486 and a 2GB 4mm DAT drive. I used the same card. The syquest and DAT worked with versions of tar for MacOS 7, SunOS 4.x, OS/2, DOS and Linux. Back when my drives were < 500MB, 2GB was quite large.

Along the way, I picked up other SCSI adapters; they were new or salvaged. I have a Symbios 53c825, an Adaptec 2940u, a Compaq Ultra 2. I thought they'd work great in my AMD dual core Solaris box.

*sigh*. The Symbios uses the ncrs driver which is 32 bit only. The 2940 uses the adp which is only 32bit. The Compaq uses the cadp which is also only 32 bit. They will work in Linux and probably MacOSX. I've found some stuff on the net about the adp and cadp drivers having issues and the glm driver for LSI chips is in house. The glm driver is the only one of the lot to be 64 bits.

So, for Solaris, I need a new card. The best bet I think is an LSI (ne symbios) card that uses the glm driver. The 53c825 isn't supported by glm, but many older/newer ones are. Sun used LSI chips. Some of the LSI cards are much cheaper then the Adaptec (the adp320 driver will work) I would need to get. I'm getting one on eBay at 1/3 the price of the Adaptecs that would work. More information later.

I could run backups on my Linux box, but I want to have the drive local to the disks, etc. Gigabit is about 60 MB/s and the drive is 8 (5?) MB/s so there's no lack of bandwidth, but all the data is on the Solaris file server.