Re: (Network Connections)

[mark@sun (Mark Manning/Metrica)]

Nathan Mates (nathan@visi.com) wrote:
: Ross Falconer <falcon@comtch.iea.com> wrote:
: >May I add an idea to this discussion?

:    Sure, but since it's not related to programming at all, and people
<snip>
Well, first I want to say that >this< message was quite a
bit better put than other posts which Nathan's put up.
Good show Nate!  :-)

Secondly, I have to agree with what Nathan is saying.  If
you had:

SCSI Disks<--->Computer<--->SCSI CABLE<--->Computer<--->SCSI Disks

(basically the SCSI disks were hung off of each computer on
a separate line from the SCSI line going between the
computers), then what Ross proposed would not be all that
bad.  The requests would then be handled by the individual
computers rather than by the SCSI bus.  This would allow
each of the computers to select when a disk drive was
written to and would result in something similar to
AppleTalk (where a computer requests information from a
given disk drive and the request is routed through the
computer with the disk drive to the drive).  But if you
had:

Computer<--->SCSI Disks<--->Computer

then you are asking for trouble.  This is because reads and
writes are being left up to the SCSI firmware which (I
believe) is not intended to handle multiple computers
trying to read/write information.

So which kind of set-up are you using?

PS: If I remember correctly (which I probably do not) - I
have seen packages for SCSI cables which depict a Mac, a
cable, a disk drive, another cable, and a Mac.  So
obviously there must be some way to do this.  But
personally, I would not want to trust my disk drives to sit
in the middle of two Macs (or Apples for that matter) and
let them bang away at it.  I'd much rather go the safer
Mac-Cable-Mac route and let the computers handle the
reads/writes to and from the disk drives.  Just my opinion.  :-)

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