OT: the USB and floppy hassles...

[John Esak]

Well,
The whole USB thing did get solved. Partially.  I was able to make the
computer read the USB keyboard after the SCO kernel was running... by
changing a couple settings in BIOS. For example, there was one called USB
Emulation:  I put this from off to on. It now also read the floppy. However,
it would *never* ever find the packge on the floppy. I'm not sure why. The
floppy would click, the red light would come on...but It would always say
"Sorry, the package is not on this volume." Very, very extremely annoying.
So finally, we decided to make completely loaded EdgeRestore disk. These
allowed us to boot up into Edg's main recovery menu. Thank goodness for
Edge.

Meanwhile, though, the hard disk adapter cold still not be loaded because
the SCSI drives ordered in the machine were SAS, not regular old legacy
SCSI. The adapter was LSI and we were told it would work with Openserver 5.
Since I was told the proper name of the adapter *and* I was told that it
would work with SCO, I tried for hours to load all the 3 LSI  drivers there
are for SCO. No luck. Finally, in the middle of the night, I took the
machine apart and really looked at it closely. It didn't tell me too much,
so I started running down the pre-installed RAID to see if they had somehow
loaded it on Channel 2 or something. It was not immediately apparent in the
RAID utility either other than seeing Group I everywhere. Drives were listed
as being 01:01, 01:02, 01:03... so I took that to mean HEY STUPID, they are
on channel 1 instead of channel 2. So, I spent another couple hours varying
the bootstrings of every knon LSI adapter to use Channel 1 (Bus 1) intead of
defaulting or actually specifying 0 as I had been. No luck.

Finally, for ne reason, I decided to pop one of the hot-swap drives and look
at it. I fully expectad to see a typical Seagate SCSI drive on which I could
check the ID jumpers. Even though the 5 drives were plugged into the
backplane, these would still have to be set properly. Anyway I found what
looked to be a SATA drive instead of a SCSI drive! This threw me for a loop,
since we had ordered a SCSI machine, got a litsing on the order for 15K SCSI
drives, etc. So I called Dell (it was 2pm in the morning when they picked
up... 2 hours and 40 minutes of being on hold... I called them on another
line and said, I've been on hold for 2 hours and 40 mintutes on another
line, are you ever going to pick it up? The person directing calls to the
right queue told me it was impossbile, and that I couldn't be on hold that
long... I said wait a minute, and I conferenced her in with there hold music
on the other line.... She listened for a minute and then said, that she had
been watching the queues and nobody was on hold for more than 15 minutes.
She asked if this could be some other number I had called by mistake. Just
as I was about to go apoplectic, the hold nnouncer came on and stareted
talking about how great Dell service was... and how all the other attnedants
were working as hard as possible to answer my call... :-)  She was blown
away. Oh my God! I dont' even show you in the queue. I told her it was she
who had put me there 2 hours and 40 minutes ago... and she then rmembered
becuase I had said something funny to her. Anyway, she said I'll connect you
to someone right away and then put me to the same musical queue I had on the
other line.  They were a little out of sync with each other but both were
playing in my speakers when I was just about to go balisstic. "Click, can I
help you?". I was so relieved. I hung up the other line and started talking
to the tech... who addly enough, and strangely enough turned out to be
extremely knowledgeable and helpful. I told him I had to stop pissing about
(an old John Lennon saying for those of you under 50) and that I need to
know the exact adapter model, and the exact driver they used to run
Openserver on this box. (They no longer support SCO, they usually will not
tell you this stuff.) He started running down the drives, the backplane and
the adapter and such in the machine and kept saying SAS. I stopped him after
a minute and said wait a minute, these are really supposed to be just SCSI
drives. They have a connecter that looks like SATA, are they in fact SCSI or
not?  He then started telling me about Serial Attached SCSI, which I know
very little about. Only that SATA and SCSI are now often listed in BIOS's as
the same thing. Come to learn one is just a subset of the other. I knew
immediately that this stuff isn't supported in 5.0.6 SCO and we had been
duped. What a waste of many days for both me and the fellow (from the FP
Room) that I am helping with this.

In any case, they were willing to take the machine back and with lots of
help from Tom Podnar we were able to locate similar rack mountable machines
from HP, who *DO* support SCO and *DO* have drivers and adapters for SAS.
Yeesh, what a long haul. As it turns out the HP systems were rather pricey,
almost twice as much as the DELL machines, so it turned out easier just to
exhange the box for a regular (non SAS) SCSI machine, and for the same price
got an extra drive, a floppy dirve (haleleujah!), two CPUS's *and* an
adapter for the tape drive... all for just $200 more than the machine that
would not support SCO. Incidentally, someone suggested, I think Bryan, that
we just "install a floppy". No way. The only choice was USB, there is no
floppy connector on the motherboard, and no reference to a floppy in the
BIOS...and only PCI-X connectors insde the box. Just no way. These
rack-mountable units are fantastic feats of engineering, but you are locked
into space and new-motherboard restrictions, period. The convenience is
great, but unless you have the drivers for your O/S, don't consider that you
might be able to modify the way they do things.

What did I learn from all this? Nubmer one, BackupEDGE is a miracle product
aht can do almost anything... but I knew that before I started. Don't
believe what a salesman tells you. Read order forms carefully, and if you
don't recognize somethihng, ask questions. (However, in our defense, it must
be noted that I queried the folks at DELL relentlessly on the phone and in
emails as to whether the machine would support Openserver 5.0.6 and was
assured several times, that while they did not support SCO, they "knew" it
would work on SCO because lots of people were doing it. Before the machine
was bought, I even made them tell me the manufacturer of their OEM'd Perc
Raid adapter... after finding out it was LSI, I finally believed them that
it would truly work on SCO. And still I got snookered.) So the second thing
I learned was try not to get snookered. I suggested to DELL that they put
the letters SAS into their description of every controller and every hard
drive attached, just so confusion like this won't happen again.

By the way, back to the actual topic, USB and SCO. Yes, while it is
supported after 5.0.6.a... it still behaved somewhat flakey, and my guess
is, even at 5.0.7, what people say is right... it may still be flakey and
iffy. I have no idea about 6.0.

John Esak