[ale] SCSI CDROM

[James P. Kinney III]

I think my (only) scsi cdrom is is flaking out. I'm trying to load IRIX
onto an SGI Octane and some of the cdrom access works and other parts
(deeper than one or two directories) fail with either a scsi error (in
sash) or a hard lock after a screen of gripes (in miniroot).

Does anyone have an external scsi CDROM that supports 512k blocks that I
can borrow for a day to test this mess. It may also be the external scsi
fast-wide scsi bus is bad on the Octane itself  :-{

Also, the efs filesystem support in kernel-2.4.19 is really crappy. It
segfaults all over. But (!) I was able to make an SGI partition label on
a drive, create proper SGI partitions format with xfs, and through
numerous contortions, get a rudimentary miniroot and a few tools loaded
onto the drive. I can't directly mountand SGI cdrom. They use efs
filesystem, not iso9660. If I dd the image to a local file, I can
loopback mount it as an efs file system. I guess the cdrom device code
is too tied to iso9660 format to allow direct access with a different
format.

At any rate, if someone has an external scsi CD I can borrow for a day,
I'll be ecstatic to come pick it up and bring it back!

Oh, yeah. tftpbooting an SGI with a Linux server doesn't seem to work
either. I can see that the request is received and a reply sent, but the
Octane doesn't like the reply so it keeps requesting.  I was able to
remote boot my HP C160 using this setup to upgrade a firmware issue and
install Pa-Linux so I know the process does work. I found some info
about some no-fragment kernel network setting that needed to be set. It
didn't help though. The SGI boxes with that complaint were the much
older Indys. 

SGI Octane dual 195MHz, 256Mram, 2x4G drives, SSI graphics (dual GPU's)
and a wife who has forbidden me to EVER look at Ebay again.
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



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