backplane identification

Charles Sprickman spork at bway.net
Wed Sep 15 15:50:01 PDT 2004


Hi,

This is kind of a long shot, but I figure there might be some people here 
that can give me a hand.

I have a problematic box from a vendor called "Einux".  Not my choice, it 
was already here, it was expensive, and I needed to use it for our mail 
server.  It's running FreeBSD 4.8p-something, and has an Adaptec 2110S 
single-channel raid controller with 4 drives in a 1+0 setup.  IBM drives 
(blech).

The controller has been dropping drives left and right.  Adaptec has 
little to say, and we have four new Seagate Cheetah's waiting to be 
installed anyhow.  But now I'm getting curious about the scsi backplane in 
this thing.  There's no docs, and Einux has apparently disappeared from 
the business.  I did dig up a phone number for them, and got a bit of info 
about the backplane. 
(http://web.archive.org/web/20011230060219/einux.com/A2200.html)

Perhaps someone can help me identify it...  The case is 2U, with 3 drives 
stacked on each other in one backplane, 3 more in another.  Each backplane 
has two scsi connectors, and no indication of whether it auto-terminates 
or not.  I'm kind of screwed with no docs here, so any "intuition" anyone 
might have about these backplane setups would be most appreciated.

The way everything is cabled now is: raid controller->first backplane 
unit->second backplane unit->active terminator (one cable).

Looking more closely, those backplanes should probably be chained:
raid controller->top connector of first backplane (one cable), bottom 
connector of first backplane -> top connector of second backplane, then 
possibly a terminator hanging off of the bottom connector of the second 
backplane.

Sorry for being so far OT, if anyone has ideas as to where else to post, 
I'm all ears.  Googling for "einux" and "backplane" doesn't turn up 
anything of interest.

Thanks,

Charles

___
Charles Sprickman
NetEng/SysAdmin
Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net
spork at bway.net - 212.655.9344



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