That makes it sound a lot like the old FC7 shelves... Even worse than FC8/9!

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Michael Bergman Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 3:35 PM To: spork@bway.net Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Using old FC shelves without filer (EM)

Right, I figured that part out, but below the two FC ports there is another module with two DB-9s marked "Comm 1" and "Comm 2". Just curious what those do. Anyone here ever console into those?

Well, yes... sort of. But not "console". We used those modules here, it's long time ago now but I'm pretty sure that those serial ports are what I think they are:

the DB9's are RS232 interfaces into the EM (Environmental Module). With these old shelves, the signal path for the EM controls were not in-band SCSI but on these separate DB9 serial ports :-( They were daisy chained with separate serial cables.

I doubt that you'd be able to interface with that EM protocol on another system anyway, to my knowledge no tech info on this is readily available. Besides, NetApp had big problems with quality on those old EM's replaced them with new ones -- those had in-band SCSI signaling and hence no serial ports on them. It's not unlikely that those EM's are broken in some way anyway, they must be really old by now.

So, just ignore those serial ports. There'll be no way for you to make the host system read environ-info from the shelves, but AFAIK they'll signal with alarms (audio and visual) on the actual shelf as well. Hope so at least... :-\

Good luck, /M