[SunHELP] External SCSI Drive

[P Nutton]

> Greetings all -
> 	I have a Sun Blade 1000 running Solaris 8 that I need 
> to buy an external SCSI drive for.  This drive will be sent 
> back and forth to another location and will be used on 
> another Solaris Machine of some sort on the other end.  I 
> have a few questions that hopefully you can all answer:
> 1. Is there a non Sun drive I could buy, the least expensive 
> one I could spec out cost 4k.  This is a lot more than I 
> anticipated on spending
> 2. Assuming there is some kind of external HD, how do I make 
> sure the same drive can be used on both systems (do they 
> require the same OS)?
> 3. How do I mount them (reboot -F type of thing)?
> 
> Anything information on how to accomplish this task would be 
> greatly appreciated

We do this with nearly all of our workstations, a couple of years ago we
used external housings, either Artecon or DataSilo ($3000 inc SCSI disk) but
now we spend $150 on a 5.25 removable drive bay enclosure (they come in SCSI
or IDE) and fit the original disk back into it. We have some workstations in
a similar config to yours, but use solstice disksuite to mirror internal and
external disks, then remove the external to boot a second machine, a sort of
"quick clone". We also use external disks on some systems as "data only", so
a reboot is not necessary when moving them, just drvconfig, devlinks and
disks commands (devfsadm in Sol8?).

NB, if doing this with a sunblade you need a special short enclosure, as
some of the internal hardware gets in the way of a full length 5.25 bay.
-- 
Paul Nutton, sysadmin, awe plc, naff company disclaimer to follow
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