Sun 3/50 and Shoebox

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Mon Feb 9 17:36:31 1998

John Ruschmeyer <jruschme_at_exit109.com> wrote:
> Actually, you may want to set the disk to ID 3. SunOS does this weird
> swapping of ID 0 and ID 3. Somebody posted the historical reason a while
> back to comp.sys.sun.hardware, but I believe it had to to with 3 being the
> likely address of another sort of device.

Y'all are gonna make me pull aphasia out of storage and set it up
to look at the generic 4.1.1 config file for the Sun 3, aren't you?

My recollection is that this was changed about the time Sun started
shipping SPARC workstations that were likely to have internal disks.
(Or was it with the 3/80? That could also have internal disks.) I
first ran across it when I had to deal with SPARCstation IPCs and
found that the kernel config file mapped sd0 to SCSI ID 3 (and that
systems shipped with an internal disk tended to come with the internal
disk's SCSI ID set to 3).

My guess as to the reason for this was that a number of these systems
were displacing older Sun 3/50 and 3/60s with external shoeboxes,
where the disk in the shoebox was set to SCSI ID 0. The old Sun 3
would go away but its shoebox would stay behind, and the user would
get the bright idea to plug it into the new SPARCstation for a little
more disk space. The 0<->3 swap made this work a little bit more
smoothly by avoiding the need for the user to open up the shoebox and
switch the SCSI ID, as well as the service call required to explain
this need.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Mon Feb 09 1998 - 17:36:31 GMT