[tech] HDD for Mako/Moray/Mermaid

[Simon Fryer]

Morning All

I think I will add my cent or so on the technical discussion on the 
hard drive issue as I was responsible for Mel's knowledge at the 
committee meeting as to what was lying about.

I probably should have replied to Ben's email earlier about the hard drive 
issue and actually turned up to the committee meeting but I had other 
commitments on tuesday afternoon. 

I have found a hard drive suitable for mako (>400MB), brought in the SCSI 
card and found a SCSI cable and refitted the termination resistors to the 
drive. The pile was sitting of the coffee table in UCC yesterday evening. 
It should still be there. The drive and controller have been used by Richard 
under FreeBSD so there should not be any problems with it in mako. To my
knowledge, Mako is a 486 ISA based machine which does mostly network
type things. The conclusion I draw from this is that the performance of
Mako will not be affected be the (slower?) drive. 

The change from IDE to SCSI on mako whould be rather trivial I would imagine. 
Shut down all the services on mako, tar/ftp a copy of the file system to
mussel or /home as needed. Replace hardware and boot using favouret OS that
can format and write UFS file systems. ifconfig and ftp/untar the file 
system back again. Create /dev driectory. Rebuild kernel with scsi card drivers.
Reboot. This sounds a lot like a starfish install apart from the rebuilding
kernel bit! 

I did like Mustangs suggestion of getting another drive for Mermaid and
dropping Mermaids drive into another machine, but I think there are more
deserviong machines than Mako for this - moray for instance would probably
be happier with a slightly larger drive.  

This is just my cent or two on the matter. Please feel free to flame my opions
to death. The SCSI option was suggested as an optimal way of achieveing 
close to the same result with lower outlay from UCC. 

See Ya
Simon

-- 
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"Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to 
philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is 
the utility of the final product."  
Lectures on the Electrical Properties of Materials, L.Solymar, D.Walsh