--------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 260 OS/2 HARDWARE Ref: F4F00010 Date: 04/10/98 From: JONATHAN MICHAELS Time: 04:08pm \/To: PETER GARNER (Read 3 times) Subj: motherboards and os/2 Hello Peter! Sunday April 05 1998 05:50, Peter Garner wrote to Jonathan Michaels: JM>> can you tell me some more, like how it works under load, say JM>> in a network, please. tyan's are also just recntly available JM>> in australia. they are also well like in frebsd circles JM>> (from what i PG > I have a Tyan Tiger S1692S (as you know) and it seems fine. PG > Once I got the CD Jumper problem fixed, I have had no problems PG > with it. I have Debian Linux and Warp 4.0 running on it. The PG > results from DISKIO are as follows : noted and stored for future reference ... PG > Note Jonathan, that the transfer rate on the 32x ATAPI CD-ROM is PG > 14x, EXACTLY as you predicted! gosh it gets awkward when you are right once .. thn youhave to repeat the performance .. drats .. grin. PG > I AM impressed! now don't get carried away peter, any good mechanical enginaeer could have been just as right once the basic system principle were explained. PG > The one PG > thing I would point out in the Tyan vs. the SuperMicro, is that PG > I could NOT find a SuperMicro board with 4 DIMM slots in a PG > Single CPU model. this part of thereason i am still not playing with my new toy .. sigh, my supplierr forgot that the ppro 440fx chipset doesnt support dimms just simms, he got me 128 mb of really topshelf dimms now he has to wait till i order another lx or bx chipseted mother bpard to recover his outlay . grim grin. most of his customers read the ms win95 cerial box and see pentium 90 with 16 (or whatever it is thesedays) megabyte and that is what they order. etc etc etc PG > In fact the Tyans were the ONLY single CPU PG > boards that had 4 instead of 3 DIMM slots. not if they are intel 440fx chipset users .. unless they cut and shut thier own technology .. which would explain some of the horror stroies i;ve seen by direct onservation .. not hersay or even circumstatial evidence. this in part is why i stayed away from the tyans, not becaue of the problems, but out here in the boonies (read, anyware not mainland usa) getting it fixed, repaiered replaced is a real pain in the rectoid mastiff (bum frothose not versed in latin or not afraid of a normal description od an important part of the human anatomy .. sort of grin) PG > (There is a Gigabyte PG > board that meets this, but I was told Gigabyte recalled it or PG > some similiar B.S). gigabytes are nice if you can get a good one, the australian distributter is enve half reasonable as regards aftersales servicing, also theu are some 3 minute drve from my home .. unlike the supermicro .. its about 45 mnutes rive each way. PG > Say, what do you recommend for an UW SCSI drive? let me warn you this is like the mouse asking the cat about the chesse . n. i've been into harddrives for about 8 years now .. about 8 years ago i purchased my first fujitsu, it was a 5 1/4 inch full height 345 mb esdi rive. when it seeked the whole world knoew it was working, as well as this when it was operating the top surface was hot enough to keep my coffee drinkable, ore than that hot would be a better description .. it is a noise but utterly reliable drive it cost me some 8 thousand dollars .. and today it is still serving files and waking up the mices and cockeroaches when it does its unix maintenance routines. isome 6 years ago i purchased my second fujutsu a same chassied 650 mb mb csi 2 device (it cost some $2k5) same heatng same noise same everything .. except it took me five years and one month to kill it .. i tried really hard and one moring it just stoped working .. 3 weeks after its warrenty expired .. um. also please note that of the current fujitsu;s they all runf stone mother ess cold and so quiet that you have to know you turned it on or ba able to see he little led it firs up when it initialises or you have extra sehsativ hands finfures so that when you touch it you can 'feel' the platter rotating .. ith my motoru neiron progreesing io can no longer repteably give you an accurate answer, my hands (and cns) anre not what they used to be. in an extravagent manner i am saying they they are very quiet and cool drive that is utterly reliable but that all of this comes at a price. since those two intial purchases i have always concidered the 20 to 30 ercent premium for the fujitsu to be worth the 'piece of mind' God is the only one who knows howw much i need every bit i can get my hands on. i have ordered and installed cheaper, seagates, connors, maxtors quantums et al, at the end of the day they all camme back with dead drives and after seeing the blod stained 660 mb fujitsu (while it was still working) they would go he extra few dollars and install fujitsu. sure thier have been failures, some even catastrophic .. but fujitsu australia took only 30 minutes to organise a replacement. quantum is the only one that came close to this sort of service. recently ibm have put out a good line of new scsi3 range of drives that are competetive to fujitsu in terms of performance (over the long haul) and are slightly better priced .. tehy are still avout some 10 to 15 percent premium over the market average. i am about to purcahse a pair, actaully three of the ibm 4 gb 5400 rpm drives the ultras not the ultrwides, i have limited funds. these three drives and the supermicro are going to be the freebsd backbone in a dualboot configuration with os/2 as the partner file system in a desktop workstation sgml document development cycle server sort of thingie. while i (that is in my personal hardware) have not used other drives (than he fujitsu) i've built hardware for clients oand only the fujitsu has performed utterly reliably ..i would take the same fastidious care and concern over the installation of the drivers,and thier support mechanisms as wellas the actual drives themselves, i;d make sure that i had the current firmware and driver fixes etc etc. even so the bloody things would still slap my face with monotonious regularity .. and the cleints would blame me .. they are the nes who demanded cheap hardware. another thing i have learned over the years is that a pair of sloer drives could whoop the pants of a single fasterdrive, especailly in a multi tasking envoronment .. what i do is to puts the operating system on on drive and some of the regular tools. on the scond i'd put the application packages and the spool file (this way i could make i much bigger than i would ordinarily, like if it was on the same spindle as the os itself), and then on the third drive would put the data (read qrite retrieve) stuff as wwell as some special tools for file system recovery and file maintence. please not i said third drive, i sometimes use the least active of the two drives in a two drive setup. now more and more i see that the significant advantages of the third drive out way the original additional expence of the third rive. this way i can effectively use three 5400 rpm drives that run stone otherless cold 24/7 and have significant reliabulity advantages because of theri 'slow' rotation. this kind of setup can return much much better overall system performance than one 10 gb seaget baracouda at 10,000 rpm and allo of its attedant costs .. the incredibe heat genertated the alteration of the case to ensure adequate cooling of the baracouda as well as the processor and the other internals alos the other small issues assoicated with adrive spinning at 10k rpm .. some of themore engineering versed could help you here .. i'm just a poor (demented) irrigation control systems hacker .. how fast does turf grow at any rate .. grin. as you can see, i'm really into redundant and ultra relliable systems, even t the expence of instantanious performance figures, which at the end of the day prove very little, other than how big your ego is .. seeing as i cannot fford a big ego i stick with stuff that works for me and that short of a atastropic sytems faiute like a direct lightening strike or an earthquake, etc etc it is going to be working when i get up i the morning and every morining. so mayb i am not the best person to ask .. well anyway this is n=my two cents worth ps to the others who may read this, is it possible to setup multiple (on sepreate physical drives) swap files in os/2 ala freebsd (well ok most unicies) PG > KWQ/2 1.2i If you call me insane again, I'll eat your other PG > eye sorry i got that one already .. wanna share a leg ? Jonathan pps, with regards to the blood on my old fujitsu, i droped it one day and hen i realised what was about to happen i put my arm on the ground directly in harms way .. it didn't brake aanything and my arm was ok too save a deep gash in one of the bones and some broken skin .. and a broose that took ages to go away .. still hurts from time to time. see, you have got to talk nicely to your computer, it could just get up and bite you one day . mine are begning to understand me and we are begginging to get on well .. grin ... i do what i can, with what i have, are you able to say the same ? --- GoldED/386 3.00.Beta3+3022 * Origin: Fire&Ice CBCS +61 2 93172184 -Sydney NSW- News Mail UUCP (3:712/808) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 260 OS/2 HARDWARE Ref: F4G00000 Date: 04/11/98 From: MARK LEWIS Time: 03:22pm \/To: JUSTIN BAUSTERT (Read 4 times) Subj: ? regarding Memory CB>> My board has the Award BIOS that allows an OS/2 setting for >64MB. I CB>> was somewhate disappointed to find that the cache is not upgradable CB>> on my motherboard. Maybe this is a YMMV type of a situation? JB> Either way you have the above setting, I think it only has an JB> effect on v2.11 or lower. No version of Warp requires that JB> change. IIRC, that setting alteres the way the motherboard access memory... in OS/2 mode, all memory is access in a linear fashion whereas the other mode is a segmented or paged access mode. there's definitely a difference but i do not know if OS/2 can or will detect the difference and adjust for it... )\/(ark * Origin: (1:3634/12) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 260 OS/2 HARDWARE Ref: F4G00001 Date: 04/10/98 From: JUSTIN BAUSTERT Time: 11:45pm \/To: CHARLES BOWMAN (Read 4 times) Subj: Re: ? regarding Memory CB> My board has the Award BIOS that allows an OS/2 setting for >64MB. I CB> was somewhate disappointed to find that the cache is not upgradable CB> on my motherboard. Maybe this is a YMMV type of a situation? Either way you have the above setting, I think it only has an effect on v2.11 or lower. No version of Warp requires that change. Tell us how it works out, as I'm sure a few of us would like to hear actual results of what we think "should" happen.. JB --- Telegard/2 v3.09.b17/mL * Origin: Courier Central \ Cashion, OK \ 405.433.2665 (1:147/92) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 260 OS/2 HARDWARE Ref: F4G00002 Date: 04/10/98 From: LYNN NASH Time: 12:50am \/To: CHRISTER JACOBSSON (Read 4 times) Subj: Nec cdr-463 & audio grabb CJ>Hi! CJ>In my system I have a internal NEC 16x SCSI-2 CDROM which the Warp3 CJ>application reports the following facts about: CJ>=== Cut === CJ>This CDROM is attached to a Adaptec 2940UW adapter and I'm booting my CJ>warp server v4 Advanced SMP with the aic7870.add basedev which CJ>identifies itsefl as CJ>=== Cut === CJ>Adaptec 7800 Family Driver for OS/2 v2.1x, Warp v3.x/d1.22 CJ>=== Cut === CJ>Now I have tried various OS/2 audio grab programs against this CDROM but CJ>none of these was able to grab an audio track off an ordinary CJ>audioCD. BUT! If I boot straight DOS (Caldera OpenDOS v7.01) CJ>using Adaptec's ASPI8DOS.SYS, ASPICD.SYS and Caldera's CJ>nwcdex.exe (Caldera's counterpart to the m$ mscdex), I am quite CJ>able to grab audio tracks off an audioCD using a DOS program CJ>(can't remember which now). More curious is that the same CJ>program won't grab if I runs it in the Warp3 DOS box which CJ>supposedly should have the mscdex support in it. CJ>So, what's wrong here? Is something wrong with the CD or is it CJ>misbehaving SCSI basedev drivers in Warp3 that prevents me from CJ>grabbing audio tracks under Warp3? This is a guess on my part because it goes back to the first audioCD functions in OS/2 2.x and discussion on Talklink by one of the developers of CD player, OS/2 does analog transfer of audio tracks by default (the little cable that goes from the CD to your sound card). That function is just like your walkman and you are just using the sound card to get to the speakers. You have to turn on digital transfer so that data actually flows across the SCSI bus to do a grab. The Warp CD player has this as an option (compac disk in the multimedia folder). I don't know what you are using for the grab but I believe it has to be able to enable digital transfer or have a mixer that works with your sound card and capture it that way just like you would from an external source like a microphone. I would imagine that your DOS program is more of a brute force thing and under OS/2 it is virtualized like all the rest of the hardware. Sorry that I could not be of more help, multimedia has not been a particularly interesting thing for me to do. The only way that I could carry a tune if via boom box. --Lynn * SLMR 2.1a * What's Up? - I don't know, I've never been there... --- DB 1.39/004485 * Origin: The Diamond Bar BBS, San Dimas CA, 909-599-2088 (1:218/1001) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 260 OS/2 HARDWARE Ref: F4G00003 Date: 04/10/98 From: DON WOODALL Time: 12:53pm \/To: PETER GARNER (Read 3 times) Subj: Two questions In a message dated 04-05-98, Peter Garner said to Don Woodall: PG>DW> in a DOS window, I recommend an ELSA video card. ELSA is PG>DW> still supporting OS/2 with good drivers. Matrox is just PG> PG> PG>I have seen alot about these ELSA video cards lately (AFTER I PG>bought a Matrox of course! ) DO you have a URL for PG>ELSA? PG> Peter # | README file for | | ELSA OS/2 WARP Version 3 and 4 driver version 01.20 | | ELSA WINNER 3000-L | | Copyright (c) 1994-97 ELSA AG, Aachen (Germany) | | ELSA AG Internet : http://www.elsa.de | Sonnenweg 11 LocalWeb : +49-(0)241-938800 | D-52070 Aachen CompuServe : GO ELSA | | ELSA Inc. Internet : http://www.elsa.com | 2231 Calle De Luna CompuServe : GO ELSA | Santa Clara, CA 95054 | USA | | ELSA Asia Inc. Internet : http://www.elsa.com | 7F-11, No. 188, Sec. 5 CompuServe : GO ELSA | Nanking East Road | Taipeo 105 | Taiwan, R. O. C. | | 12/04/97, IHensch Don Woodall ___ * MR/2 * 2 better than 1; 3 better than 2; 4.0 is better than 95. --- Maximus/2 2.02 * Origin: OS/2 Shareware BBS, telnet://bbs.os2bbs.com (1:109/347) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 260 OS/2 HARDWARE Ref: F4G00004 Date: 04/10/98 From: GREGORY URBAN Time: 07:32pm \/To: ALL (Read 2 times) Subj: Arcada Backup? Greetings, Recently I aquired a Tandberg 3800 SCSI-2 tape drive as a replacement for my old Colorado "floppy tape" drive. I had been using BackMaster with the old drive but since it does not support SCSI drives I bought Arcada Backup Personal Version 2.0 for OS/2. This product allegedly supports SCSI drives but only shipped with drivers for parallel and floppy tape drives and won't recognize my SCSI tape drive. The big problem is that Seagate bought out Arcada (I think), and I cannot find anything on Seagate's web site for this particular version of the software. The hardware in question consists of the above mentioned tape drive connected to a Promise DC440 SCSI-2 controller (Adapted 1540 clone, uses OS/2's AHA154x.ADD driver). I do have OS/2's ASPI drivers and the OS2SCSI.DMD driver installed also. The System Information Tool recognizes the drive. Anyone have any experience with using Arcada Backup 2.0 for Warp with an SCSI QIC tape drive? Thanks, Greg * 1st 2.00 ~ Never blame the rainbows for the rain. --- QScan/PCB v1.19b / 01-0671 * Origin: AirPower Telnet://airpower.dyn.ml.org 610-259-2193 (1:273/408) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 260 OS/2 HARDWARE Ref: F4G00005 Date: 04/10/98 From: WILL HONEA Time: 10:53pm \/To: TONY PATER (Read 2 times) Subj: os/2 - Printer IRQ ? Tony Pater wrote to Will Honea on 03-31-1998 TP> If such be the case, then how would allocation of IRQ's and TP> addresses TP> work given that spare IRQ's may or may not be available if as I intend, TP> to have: TP> . 4-port intelligent Serial card Assuming SIO.SYS, uses up to 4 ports (no problem) and 1 IRQ? I'm not up to speed on this card. TP> . 2 printers (laser/ink-jet) No choice: IRQ 7 for LPT1, IRQ5 for LPT2 if you use /IRQ, which I would if possible. BTW, it's all or none here - can't use /IRQ for one and not the other. TP> . scanner (scsi), Port addresses, 1 IRQ may be required (some el cheapo scanner SCSI ports don't use an IRQ, but then you have a driver problem) TP> . graphic pad (Summa-sketch) TP> . Mouse For my enlightenment, how are you going to use 2 pointing devices? I thought that only one at a time was definable - but since you brought it up, I'm not sure. Anyway, if it works there goes one serial port and 1 IRQ - I have serious doubts about being able to use it on the smart i/o card if it maps to a single IRQ since the mouse driver will grab the IRQ and deny it to the comm drivers. Oops, just re-read this. You are OK if you have a program that can drive the pad, but it will NOT share controll of the mouse pointer so this may be messy TP> . APC Power management Uses one serial port - one smart i/o board channel taken TP> . 2 x Serial connects to RF gear 2 more smart i/o ports taken - I'm still assuming the whole card shares an IRQ. TP> . Sound Card 1 IRQ, 2 DMA, TP> TP> Presumably the mouse can go on to PS/2 connection (Tyan mobo) OK, port is no problem, IRQ 12 is used for the mouse TP> The graphics pad and APC would go on the Serial card along 2 RF gear TP> connections, though how to swing a modem on top escapes me for the TP> moment. So far, this is not a problem IF the smart I/O card shares a single IRQ for all the ports. You will have IRQ 3 or 4 for the smart I/O, 5 and 7 for printers. That leaves you IRQ 2 and the unused one of either 3 or 4. The sound card should be able to use IRQ 10, the PS/2 mouse will want 12, and the SCSI card can probably be selected to user IRQ 15. These are normal enough assignments. Looking at your IRQ map, that will leave you with IRQ 2 (actually hooks to 9) and 3 on the low side and IRQ 11 one the high side to play with for a modem. Piece of cake! :-} TP> Assuming that an 'intelligent' Serial Card (STB/Stallion), can TP> multi-plex (hope I'm using the right term), would it be necessary TP> to specify each and every IRQ/address for each item printers/scanners/ TP> RF gear/etc.), and if so how does leaving off the '/IRQ' switch on TP> the Printer(s), help if I'm running most of this stuff simultaneously ? You would specify the IRQ/port assignment information on the SIO.SYS line - COMM.SYS won't work in this case. You would also specify the IRQ/port for a modem if you put it in. The syntax would be DEVICE=x:\dir\sio.sys (com1,3f8,3) (com2,2f8,4) (com3,3e8,4)....(com5,ppp,4). You will need the extended version of SIO, since the base level supports only 4 ports of any mix. I would experiment with the unregistered 4 port version just to make sur it works with the smart i/o, tho. I would highly recommend using interrupts for printing: life is too short and you have the apparent resources available. As for the rest, you will have to go to the docs for sound card and the SCSI adapter. The usual choices would probably be IRQ 10 for sound - that's what Sound Blaster allows any way - and 15 for the SCSI. If you count, you will find that you still have IRQ 2/9 and IRQ 11 unused. Being a trusting hardware type, I would install OS/2 in the simplest configuration possible: smart i/o card, printer card(s), IDE drive, ATAPI CDROM. If you have more than 1 IDE drive, you cause a slight complication: you will need one more IRQ for a second IDE channel and 15 is the normally used IRQ. Your SCSI would have to use IRQ 11 most likely. Anyway, install w/o the sound and SCSI cards. Once you get up, edit config.sys and set up SIO.SYS. Before you shutdown, open the SYSTEM -> SYSTEM SETUP -> HARDWARE MANAGER folder. Open the HARDWARE MANAGER's properties notebook and, on the first page, set the hardware scanning options to do a full scan on every boot. Check the list also and see if both printers were picked up and assigned IRQs as expected. Re-boot and check out the comm ports. Power off and install the sound and SCSI - do this in two steps if you want. Boot, go to selective install and install the sound card and the SCSI adapter. You may have to add IBMASPI.??? as a device to get the scanner to work, but that can come later. This should see you up and running. You may need to play with some settings and port addresses, but this should get the basic system up to where you can start to install and check out the software for all the devices, but get the basic install done and the ports recognized before you even think about actually installing the scanner, radio, and UPC programs. Step by step, then you can solve one problem at a time - and I see several to solve before you are happy. Oh, well, that's what hobbies are for: they consume any spare time you might have....... Will Honea --- Maximus/2 2.02 * Origin: OS/2 Shareware BBS, telnet://bbs.os2bbs.com (1:109/347) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 260 OS/2 HARDWARE Ref: F4G00006 Date: 04/09/98 From: EDDY THILLEMAN Time: 08:41pm \/To: JONATHAN DE BOYNE POLLARD (Read 2 times) Subj: PS/2- or serial mouse? Hi Jonathan, 02 Apr 98, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard of 2:440/4.3 wrote to Eddy Thilleman: JdBP> A serial mouse is connected in the same way as an external JdBP> A PS/2 mouse is connected, via a different sort of connector, Are there benefits above one or another (serial vs bus mouse - a PS/2 mouse is an bus mouse), or doesn't it matter? Cheers -=Eddy=- (eddy.thilleman@net.hcc.nl) ... * <- Tribble ***+ pretty good Tribble movie rating --- MBM v4.14 * Origin: Speedy Gonsalez (2:500/143.7) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 260 OS/2 HARDWARE Ref: F4G00007 Date: 04/11/98 From: CHARLES BOWMAN Time: 08:35pm \/To: JUSTIN BAUSTERT (Read 2 times) Subj: ? regarding Memory Justin Baustert wrote in a message to Charles Bowman: JB> Either way you have the above setting, I think it only has an JB> effect on v2.11 or lower. No version of Warp requires that JB> change. Tell us how it works out, as I'm sure a few of us would JB> like to hear actual results of what we think "should" happen.. I pulled down the latest (last?) Sysbench and ran a full series last night with my current configuration. I intend to run it again with the following configurations next weekend if the memory arrives while I'm gone this week. 64MB, 128MB and 128MB with 64MB as a RAM drive for the swapper.dat. I believe OS/2 will allow me to start VDISK before it loads the swap file parameters. If not I'll have to scrub the third combination. cbowman@sinfo.net --- Renegade v98-061a dos * Origin: Techshop's Southern Most Point - Panama (1:3651/9.10) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 260 OS/2 HARDWARE Ref: F5G00000 Date: 04/11/98 From: STEPHEN HAFFLY Time: 08:09am \/To: GREGORY URBAN (Read 4 times) Subj: Arcada Backup? On (10 Apr 98) Gregory Urban wrote to All... Hi Gregory, GU> Recently I aquired a Tandberg 3800 SCSI-2 tape drive as a replacement GU> for my old Colorado "floppy tape" drive. I had been using BackMaster GU> with the old drive but since it does not support SCSI drives I bought GU> Arcada Backup Personal Version 2.0 for OS/2. This product allegedly GU> supports SCSI drives but only shipped with drivers for parallel and GU> floppy tape drives and won't recognize my SCSI tape drive. Old BackMaster was pretty nice on the floppy connect drive on my wife's computer. It didn't support ATAPI connect drives either. Check out Object Desktop Professional. With the built-in Object Backup (equivalent to Back Again/2), it supports ATAPI, and (I believe) SCSI drives (SCSI options are listed, but since I don't have one, I can't say 100%). For the cost of a backup program alone, you get quite a package of utilities, of which my favorite has become the virtual desktops. TTYL, Stephen Team OS/2, Team GEOS OS/2 & New Deal Office 98 - A great combination. ... I tried to get a life, but got a Mailer instead --- PPoint 2.05 * Origin: Thunder Mountains Point (1:309/63.4)