Hello,

We've got a couple of 650MHz Sunblade 150 machines, and they have a
couple of Firewire ports at the back, so, we naturally assumed we could
plug drives in there (well, hell, it would work on a Linux box!).
Anyway, it doesn't work. I've looked at the unofficial Sunblade 100 FAQ
page which says that Firewire hard disk support is about a year away,
BUT, the document isn't dated. So, I'm wondering if anyone else knows
what the latest is on Firewire drive support?

The drives also have a USB interface on the back, and when plugged into
a USB port, are recognised as sd1 - no problem. Unfortunately when
format is run, its wants to know all about the drive geometry, and won't
just autodetect. Shame. I've left a message with Maxtor asking for that
information, so hopefully we'll have it running on USB by the end of the
week, but Firewire/IEEE-1394 would be nicer :-)

Thanks (and also thanks to whoever did the Sunblade 100 FAQ)

Paul
~~~~~

"Paul (Jimbo) Duncan G7KES" <pdu@soc.soton.ac.uk> writes:

> The drives also have a USB interface on the back, and when plugged
> into a USB port, are recognised as sd1 - no problem.

OK. Use "iostat -En" to find out the drive's name in the
/dev/rdsk/c?t?d?s? format.

> Unfortunately
> when format is run, its wants to know all about the drive geometry,
> and won't just autodetect.

Run "prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c?t?d?s2" using slice 2 for the device name you
obtained from the above "iostat -En". Prtvtoc should print the device's
geometry information, similar to this:

# prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c7t0d0s2
* /dev/rdsk/c7t0d0s2 partition map
*
* Dimensions:
* 512 bytes/sector
* 63 sectors/track
* 255 tracks/cylinder
* 16065 sectors/cylinder
* 0 cylinders
* 21889 accessible cylinders
....

Use these values in "format", when manually configuring the drive type.

"Paul (Jimbo) Duncan G7KES" <pdu@soc.soton.ac.uk> wrote in message news:<401fa768@news.nwl.ac.uk>...
> Hello,
>
> We've got a couple of 650MHz Sunblade 150 machines, and they have a
> couple of Firewire ports at the back, so, we naturally assumed we could
> plug drives in there (well, hell, it would work on a Linux box!).
> Anyway, it doesn't work. I've looked at the unofficial Sunblade 100 FAQ
> page which says that Firewire hard disk support is about a year away,
> BUT, the document isn't dated. So, I'm wondering if anyone else knows
> what the latest is on Firewire drive support?

Unfortunately, that document _is_ out-of-date. The support
for Firewire storage was originally intended to have been available
in Solaris long ago (read: Solaris 9 or earlier). It is woefully
overdue, IMO.

The good news, however, is that all of the driver work required
to add that support (for hard disks, CD, DVD, Zip, etc.) is completed.
What remains is for the code to be integrated into Solaris. You
should be able to expect it soon in Solaris 10.