[rescue] Total corporate madness (

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:

> > You know, a neat hack would be a small FC-AL box (like the Sun 611
> > form-factor) with either an FC-AL<->FDDI or FC-AL<->Ethernet "bridge"
> > board that has an IP stack and talks NFS/AFP/SMB.  Even neater would be
> > a way to stack or daisy-chain them for RAID.  At that point, you could
> > go nuts and make the multiple Ethernet ports (as a result of stacking)
> > talk EtherChannel for a fatter pipe to workstations.
>
> The stacking request makes things harder.

Yeah, that wouldn't be a priority.  That'd a be a "nice to have in
Rev.2" item.

> A few thoughts come to mind.  If the vendor sells this as a closed box
> system, it would make more sense to use IDE for economy of scale
> reasons.

Yes, but a well-designed system should be able to have IDE, SCSI, or
FC-AL ports internally.  One model for each.

> The next thought is that the easiest way to do this would be with either
> embedded linux or embedded NetBSD.  That gives you a file system, TCP/IP,
> NFS, CIFS, and whatever Macs used to use for free.

Yep.  Using something like this would also make it easy to do magic to
figure out of the disc you just popped in has a label and filesystems on
it already.

> A third thought is build in a system for NetApp style snapshots.

That's a rather different target audience.

>  fifth thought.  The home market probably sucks because anyone who
> realizes why they might want this will also know that they can very
> cheaply by a Dell with two 200 gig IDE disks extremely cheaply,

That's also true, which is why it's a "neat hack" and not a "hot
product".

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "We're Texans.  We figure out ways to do these
Elgin, TX          (    things..."                    --Bill Bradford