News Group Posts

cd-rw, dvd writers osr5 unixware

From: Mike Brown <mike@tkg.ca>
Subject: CD and DVD writers on ProLiant servers.
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 01:27:54 GMT

I have received emails from people trying to get
CD and DVD writers working on some of the older
ProLiant servers asking for help.  I have tested
many combinations of servers with both UW7.1.3,
OSR5.0.6 and OSR5.0.7 and in general the required
IDE DMA does not work on ProLiant servers up to
the G2 release.  It is possible to master a CD
at lower speeds in PIO mode, but it requires a
lot of CPU effort.  Burning DVDs rarely work.

I have tested on ProLiant 800, 1200, 1600, 2500,
5000, 6000 and the earlier ML350, ML370 and ML530,
without getting the DMA to work.

SCSI CD writers, such as the Yamaha models work
perfectly with cdrecord.  Some SCSI drivers tend
to work better on the 1.8a22 release that uses the
older form of dev= , so if you get a no devices
error with the new version of cdrecord try the
older one.

USB writers, such as the Plexwriter 24/10/42U
also work well.  Note that on some of the
ProLiant models there is a USB chipset function
in the server support chips.  It is not available,
is not pinned out, and cannot be disabled in
the BIOS because it does not show up.  Unixware
does find it and prints out error messages,
which can cause a bit of confusion if you
are trying to get a PCI USB board working.
The Adaptec PCI card does work in a ProLiant
with UW7.1.3.

If you are going to add a CD/DVD writer into
a ProLiant, you may want to leave the Compaq
CD-ROM drive in also.  I have found that many
models do not support bootable CDs in ProLiants.

Unixware has  a few other quirks when
you are playing around with various CD drives.
With a IDE CD, a SCSI CDRW and a USB CDRW I find
four devices created in /dev/cdrom.  If you
happen to boot with the USB drive turned off,
and try to write to it, the O/S may panic.
It seems to be safe running the scanbus option
with cdrecord, and using its numbering, which
sometimes bears no resemblance to how Unixware
has number the drives.  I definitely would
recommend not playing on a production server.

I have not obtained a USB DVD-RAM drive yet
to test it with Microlite backup edge, but the
IDE DVD-RAM drive does work with edge but at
a very slow throughput rate in PIO mode. 

Mike

-- 
Michael Brown

The Kingsway Group

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