Peripherals Reccomendations

[Alexis Rosen]

In article <whatever> mann at intacc.UUCP (Jeff Mann) writes:
>[...] Hard Drives International has a 660 Meg micropolis hard drive for $2099.
>Does anyone know whether this can be used with A/UX? Has anyone seen a
>better deal in this size of drive?

See my followup to the query about Fujitsu drives.

>I am also looking for a tape drive and serial port board. I have seen
>Teac 150 meg tape drives for around $700 - same questions as above.
>Serial boards - I don't even know where to get one, much less the price.

No Teac that I know of is shipping with A/UX support. (Of course, you can use
FasTape to back up an entire volume, but that's a lousy option). MicroNet
has drivers, which they got from Tony Cooper. They're a later version of the
Beta drivers he mentioned on the net many months ago. If you ask, they'll give
them to you (if you buy their drive, which is not very expensive, but a bit more
than $700 depending on where you get it), but they die on large backups with
either tar or cpio. I suspect that this could be because of bugs in tar and
cpio, not the drivers, but I don't know. They're still useful, though- you can
use dump.bsd and restore, which are (I think) nicer than cpio and tar anyway.

FWB claims to have support for tape (Teac, DAT, or both). I don't know if they
work, since I've never seen them.

As for the serial boards, I have two Taniwha Systems CommCards. They're
excellent. They have special support for UUCP 'g' protocol, which makes them
especially nice if you're UUCPing over a high-speed modem. I know they can't
deal with 4 57.6kbit/sec connections, all active at once, but this is unlikely
to be a problem for anybody (except for one guy I met who wanted to run X
over SLIP...)

To get one, email Paul Campbell- he's on the net, at root at taniwha.uucp. (I
think unisoft!taniwha!root will work for stupid mailers.)

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis