[SunRescue] SCSI cables (Re: Why would you need something like this?)

[Robert Novak]

On Mon, 30 Apr 2001 nick at snowman.net wrote:

> You want Real(tm) High Quality scsi cables and 60$ for 6-foot isn't half
> bad.  Look at www.scsipro.com.

I usually use two "grades" of scsi cable. One is "mission critical--
failure might require me to go into the office at 2am and hope I have a
spare" for my servers at work. For those, I pay full price. A good
VHDC-HD68 cable runs about $75 for 1m or 2m from Intraserver, for example.

The other grade is "buy spares; if one dies, put another one in." These I
get from local places like Action Surplus and Weird Stuff and Central
Computer, and are my exclusive solution at home. I usually pay $10-25 per
cable. They rarely fail on me, knock on wood (taps head), but if they do,
I can have a spare on hand (or even 5). Bought a couple of VHDC-HD68
cables for $17.50 last weekend or the weekend before, for example.

I'm sure if five minutes of downtime would cost my company a million
dollars, I might go for more expensive cable, but if that were the case I
wouldn't be the only sysadmin and we'd probably have redundant pathing and
all sorts of other nifty things such that one
{cable|hba|server|building|continent} failing wouldn't shut us down. :)

--Rob

Robert Novak, Indyramp Consulting * rnovak at indyramp.com * indyramp.com/~rnovak
        "And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
           Maybe this year will be better than the last...." -- counting crows