SUMMARY: Attaching sun cdrom on rs6k server?

From: Won-Soon Lau (lws@ee.nus.sg)
Date: Fri Jun 04 1993 - 10:41:49 CDT


My original posting was:

] I want to put all the SUN cdroms together on a IBM RS6000 model580 server
] but it seems that the ibm can't detect the presence of the sun cdroms though
] it has no problem identify its own (ibm) cdrom. I'm using the integrated
] scsi controller on the rs6k and I'm quite sure the connection is there as
] the green LED lighted up on the external scsi-bus terminator.
] The cdroms worked fine on a sparc10. Anyone with similar experience could
] you please enlighten me on how to get it works?

I received several responses all pointed to the same direction -- it cannot
be done. Someone mentioned that may be IBM uses 1024 bytes/sector instead
of the 512 bytes/sectors used by SUN. Another response pointed to a
similar summary which probably can be found using the WAIS server. The
reply I received from John Murtari contains a lot of details and information
which I will append below.

> We went to quite a bit of effort here, the answer is: you
> can't hook a SUn CD-ROM directly to an RS-6000. Yes, all CD-ROMS are
> made by only one or two manufactures, and SCSI is SCSI, but the PROMS
> that are put on the drive also effect its response, and the RS-6000
> only seems to respond to a drive with IBM PROMS.
>
> What we did here was simply to mount the CR-ROM off a sun and
> then export the filesystem. On the RS-6000 we did an NFS mount of the
> filesystem...this allowed us to run things such as Info Explorer...
> Its probably more cost effective to just go ahead and by the IBM CD-ROM.

Many thanks to the following people:

        Yoshi Mizuno y@drug.COM
        E. John Benjamins johnb@edge.cis.mcmaster.ca
        Geoffrey Walton geoff@megatek.com
        Kevin Sheehan kevin@uniq.com.au
        Ed Arnold era@ncar.ucar.edu
        John Murtari jmurtari@eclat.com
        Benoit Lefebvre Benoit.Lefebvre@eng.canadair.ca

Won-Soon Lau

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