Help needed to combinine HD Units from two XTs
Mario O. Bourgoin
A while back, I posted an article about controlling two hard
disks from an XT's Xebec controller card. Thanks for all the kind
replies; it is perfectly possible to do this and I now know how. The
problem that this was supposed to solve hasn't gone away though, so
I'm back with more questions.
Background:
I'm part of a project which uses IBM XTs and PCJrs, the IBM
Cluster and Network hardware and Novell NetWare to provide networking
capabilities for PCJrs in an elementary school. The system clusters a
set of PCJrs around an XT server and the XTs are networked together
using bridges.
Situation:
We need extra storage space. The kids share the use of the XT
server's hard disk and have managed to almost fill up most of the
space available on them. The bridges that network the XTs are
themselves XTs since we had nothing else to use for this purpose;
these XT's hard disks are sitting unused.
Problem:
We need to control the bridge's hard disks from the server.
Constraints:
- We don't have money to buy other equipment.
- We don't have expansion boxes for XTs.
- An XT server can't be a bridge computer; a bridge computer
can't be an XT server.
- The XT servers need to retain use of their floppy drives
since they are used to run system maintenance software.
- The XT bridges need to retain use of their floppy drives
since they are used to load the bridge software.
Please help.
--Mario O. Bourgoin