Believe it or not, the Adaptec SCSI cards are actually psuedo reliable with
only one end of the bus terminated. You see occasional resets and such with
only one terminator, but not a complete failure mode nor even a very
frequent error mode. A recent change in the driver exposed the fact that a
significant number of people were running with only one end of the chain
terminated. Since the cable didn't sense any closure to the circuits (due
to lack of termination) the card actually didn't think a cable was attached,
the new driver then disabled termination on the card, and as a result,
people had no termination where they used to have only card based
termination.....got lots of email over that one, and it was all solved by
doing two things. Properly terminating the bus and having people pay
attention to the warning the driver issues at bootup about "Detected auto
termination, please verify driver detect settings and adjust manually if
needed" or whatever.
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E-Mail: Doug Ledford <dledford@dialnet.net>
Date: 29-Nov-97
Time: 20:58:19
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