Re: Does this help explain better?? ATA/IDE Thread

From: Stephen Frost (sfrost@ns.snowman.net)
Date: Tue Jul 25 2000 - 13:52:30 EST


On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, James Sutherland wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Khimenko Victor wrote:
>
> > For example our server do not have floppy drive at all. It does not have
> > kerboard or attached monitor as well.
>
> How do you handle situations where you need to take it down to single-user
> mode, no network?

        Some OS's will actually attempt to bring a system down to single-user
while keeping the network running and use the tty which requested the machine
be brought down as if it was console. Besides that there is the serial port,
and hooking up a montior and keyboard, which is much easier than opening the
system up and adding a floppy drive, takes alot less time too, and can be done
while the system is up.

> > And it's quite possible that vendor's image will be unable to cope
> > with our Ethernet cards with 17,20 & 21 IRQ and will be unable to find
> > IDE with 22 IRQ so any drive attached to that IDE will be out of reach
> > for update program...
>
> Can't Linux find your IDE adapter??

        Linux can, but unless the boot-floppy image made by the vendor
could (ie: used linux or loaded it's own drivers) he'd have to move
drives around into to perform the flash, talk about a pain.

> > > That way, they can't blame it on your anti-virus daemon, your NIC,
> > > the kernel version you're running, etc.
> >
> > Without my NIC I'll be unable to do ANYTHING with my system, sorry.
>
> You're pretty much stuffed when your NIC firmware upgrade fails, then. You
> have bigger problems than not getting a nice point&drool interface for
> low-level hardware modifications.

        As I mentioned above, serial port and console are possibilities.
Neither requires opening up the machine.

                Stephen

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 31 2000 - 21:00:19 EST