Troubles with SS-1 IPC and SS-2 and SCSI disks

[haynes at felix.ucsc.edu]

We hear there's a problem with the Sparcstation IPC and external SCSI
disks, and that Sun is working on a hardware fix.  I don't know whether
the make of external disk is a factor.  So far one of our 5 IPCs seems to
have the bug, which involves the SCSI bus hanging for a while and then
resetting.

Separately, we seem to be having a problem with SS2's and HP disks and
would like to ask if anyone else is seeing this problem.  If we write a
binary file to the internal disk and the same file to an external HP disk
then the two files won't compare.  Differences show up just after the
8192-th byte of the file.  The difference will be the same on every
compare as long as the disks stay mounted.  If we umount the external disk
and mount it again and compare the differences will not be the same as
they were before the umount and mount.  I've tried this with another brand
of disk and it doesn't seem to have the problem, altho I haven't done
enough testing to be very sure.  The same external disk drive seems to
work fine on an IPC.

haynes at ucscc.ucsc.edu