Post by KevinGiven that this was something i came up with off the top of my
head last night and not anything critical, i think i'll ditch the
idea. For some reason, i thought people had added USB cards to
Octanes before, but i was probably mixing it up in my head with
the 1394 stuff.
I love my Octane but i am tempted to swap back to the linux
workstation as my main box these days. I've been suing the
Octane for about two years now, but if i swapped back to my linux
1. easy access to my flash drive
2. 1easy Palm access (without having to buy a serial cable from
Treo)
3. i could use my recently acquired Wacom tablet
4. i could use the 24" SGI monitor at a decent resolution
5. i could utilize the three SATA drives (although these get used
enough via NFS so i guess this one doesn't count)
All of those are solvable except #3 with a little money and/or shell
wizardry.
1 and 2 can be done with scripts and a handy U5 with USB card (or PC
running linux).
4 can be done with a better graphics card. MXE maybe? V8 maybe? If you
must have 2k, obviously something other than an affordable Octane
upgrade would be needed. Perhaps an affordable Onyx IR instead? I kid.
5 can be done with NFS as you mention. Alternatively, you use FC-AL and
a PC running FreeBSD with the SATA drives and a a QLogic 2300 FC card.
Thus you can use the FreeBSD machine as a hardware raid unit (I haven't
tried this, only seen that FreeBSD supports FC-AL target mode, and have
heard of people using FreeBSD as a U160 Hardware RAID).
However, a simpler and more realistic way to fufill wish number 5 is via
Acard AEC-7730s. Again, I haven't tried these, but their older IDE
cousins work well. These cards are SATA->SCSI converters. Attach and
your SATA drive looks to the Octane like a U2W or U160 drive (I'd have
to double check to see which it is).
Post by KevinAll very tempting..... then again, it would probably all get
moved downstairs again the first time some PC BS started showing
up... nvidia drivers crashing, CPU fans rattling and burning out,
BIOS deciding that all of the sudden there are no hard drives in
the system..... SCREW IT. I'm sticking with my trusty Octane :)
PCI Sun. A cheap simple way to get the geegaws working next to the
Octane. Then, the network is your friend. Why should you ever have to
realize that they aren't directly connected?
Post by KevinI have done some data backups using pilot-link and some USB Palms
before under linux with no problems. I could be wrong, but
doesn't jpilot use pilot-link for all it's communications? I
don't really see how the GUI would affect communications, USB,
serial or otherwise...
Exactly what issue are you having with jpilot and USB stuff?
jpilot didn't want to accept /dev/ttyUSB1. However, I made /dev/pilot a
symlink to /dev/ttyUSB1, and then set jpilot to use /dev/pilot, and
jpilot was happy. Only potential problem is that sometimes I need
/dev/ttyUSB3 instead of /dev/ttyUSB1.
--
Joshua D. Boyd
***@jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/