AT&T 7300/3B1's

[Jules Richardson]

Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:
> Jules Richardson wrote:
>> Incidentally, I kept finding DoA Adaptec ACB4000 bridges - anyone else 
>> had the same issue (and is there a typical failure mode for them)?  I 
>> had a few of them kicking around so just labeled the dead boards up 
>> and shelved them, thinking I might get around to trying to fix them 
>> one day. Perhaps there's some common fault that affects them, though...
> 
> You sure they are bad....

Yeah, I tested against good boards in a vintage setup (with and without 
swapping in ROMs from a working board). The only other possibility would be 
that the timing constraints changed vastly between different board revisions 
and that was tripping me up.

 > You definately won't plug it into a modern SCSI bus/
> OS, and be playing with MFM drives plug and play....

Been there, done that :-) I did have a brief muck around with that a few years 
back, but the Linux SCSI code is rather spaghetti-like. the boards I believe 
will work - but from what I recall, Linux marks anything offline that doesn't 
respond to the Inquiry command and then won't let you go near it.

I suspect that the HBA doesn't care, so long as the board is SCSI rather than 
single-target SASI - and in theory it might be possible to hack the Linux 
kernel to not offline the board at boot time (and then be able to throw 
commands at it post-boot via the sg interface).

 >  Linux did have
> some support I believe for this... but it may not be in there anymore.

Not sure - it did have support for a few ST506 boards once (not sure if that's 
still true), and there was some "third party" code for supposedly driving one 
of the OMTI bridge boards - but it was written against such an old kernel that 
there was no hope of integrating it with a reasonably modern one.

cheers

Jules