Since we are talking about 1/4" tape drives

[Jules Richardson]

Dave McGuire wrote:
> On 11/5/10 12:34 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
>>>>> It should be fairly simple to modify the SCSI target disk mode code
>>>>> to pretend it's a SCSI tape.
>>>>
>>>> Did I heard on the back "SCSI-to-SD-card-Adapter-open-source"????? :oD
>>>
>>> That's what I was just thinking about. That's a MUCH nicer solution
>>> than connecting it to a computer somewhere.
>>
>> If you say so :-)
> 
>   I do. :)  I don't much relish the idea of connecting a big thick SCSI 
> cable between two computers when the connection is going to end up being 
> temporary.  It just sounds like a pain.

Yeah, I saw it as the board being local to the vintage system, rather than 
local to the modern storage system - so the only cabling between systems would 
be a cat5 cable (or some sort of wireless widget I suppose, but urgh :-)

>> I'd quite like a SCSI<->Ethernet bridge, I think.
>> Something that can spit SCSI commands over the network to a remote
>> machine. I could quite easily write some code to listen on a socket and
>> interpret those commands in whatever way was useful (which would include
>> pulling data from a file and just looking like a big ol' disk).
> 
>   That'd be pretty easy; it could basically be a transport layer 
> translator to bridge parallel SCSI with iSCSI.

Maybe - but I've found an awful lot of old systems and devices that are a bit 
flakey when it comes to their SCSI implementations (not to mention things 
which send vendor-specific commands for control and setup); personally I think 
I'd rather have the transfer in "user-land" than try to seamlessly integrate 
it with a modern protocol.

I get the impression (possibly wrong!) that something like iSCSI (and a 
back-end PC making use of it) might get tripped up by some vintage systems, 
but something doing the interpretation in user-space could easily be coded to 
cope.

cheers

Jules