The consensus seems to be that there is no way to make the card work with
Digital Unix unless you have the OS source code.
Thanks to:
alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com
"Dr. Tom Blinn, 603-881-0646" <tpb_at_zk3.dec.com>
David Warren <warren_at_atmos.washington.edu>
"Jenkins, Gary C." <gcjenkins_at_escocorp.com>
Several people recommended Intraserver and Qlogic PCI SCSI adapters.
Original message:
We recently installed an Adaptec AHA2940-UW PCI SCSI-3 card in our
AlphaStation 255/233 but "show devices" in the console failed to recognize
it. The red light on the card came on, which apparently is a good thing
(according to the person we bought the card from).
Has anyone had any experiences with this card? Anyone know whether it
should work? We're running the firmware that came with DU 4.0B.
TIA for any help -- we need to decide soon whether or not to return the
card.
Tom Blinn wrote:
Not supported by the SRM console, not supported by Digital UNIX. If you
were trying to run Windows NT with the ARC console firmware, it might be
able to support that card. The SRM console will never see it and will never
boot through it. If you were truly dedicated to making it work and you had
the full kernel sources, you *might* be able to write a device driver and
integrate it with the SCSI subsystem in Digital UNIX. I don't think you'd
have a prayer of doing it with OpenVMS. And in UNIX, adding SCSI adapters
is almost as much an art as a science. It can be done, but it's messy. It
is not a simple device driver interface, it's a bus controller, and there
isn't a well-defined interface (at the present time) for adding busses to
the system. You really need access to the full sources to do it, along with
a lot of perseverance.
If you're going to buy a "commodity" SCSI controller for use with UNIX or
OpenVMS (which use the SRM console) on an Alpha system, be sure to state
that and make sure the vendor has a 100% cash back returns policy, since
*most* "commodity" SCSI controller cards won't work.
Received on Thu Jun 05 1997 - 01:19:09 NZST