3-38 Dell PowerEdge 2100/180 and 2100/200 Systems User’s Guide
Adaptec 78xx Family host adapters and their drivers are
fully NetWare-tested and -approved. This means that you
can purchase a NetWare drive (certified as “Yes, Tested
and Approved”) from a vendor, connect it to your com-
puter system or host adapter, partition it, and create a
volume without any compatibility concerns.
Adaptec’s aic7870.dsk driver module is flexible enough
to allow you to connect NetWare-tested and -approved
SCSI drives as well as standard SCSI drives to a single
host adapter. The driver registers each hard-disk drive
accordingly.
Drive registration is a user-transparent process; no user
interaction is required. You can tell that the drive has
been detected as NetWare-tested and -approved if the
message NetWare Yes Tested and Approved is
included in the drive description string that appears when
you run monitor.nlm (disk options).
Using the NetWare Tape Backup Utility
Included with NetWare is a server-based tape backup
utility called sbackup.nlm. This allows backup of server
disk drives to a server tape drive. The sbackup.nlm util-
ity supports Adaptec host adapters.
1. Load the SCSI adapter driver.
The syntax to load the aic7870.dsk driver is:
load [pathname] aic7870 [options] slot=x
The ASPI layer (aspitran.dsk) is automatically
loaded.
2. Refer to the Novell NetWare documentation for
additional instructions on loading the server
backup software. Refer to the NetWare Server
Backup User’s Guide to load the tsa and sbackup
modules.
Setting Up a CD-ROM Drive With Net-Ware 3.12 or 4.x
To use a CD-ROM drive with NetWare 3.12 or 4.x, fol-
low these instructions:
1. Load aic7870.dsk by entering the following com-
mand line:
:load [pathname] aic7870.dsk slot=x
2. Load aspicd.dsk by entering the following com-
mand line:
:load [pathname] aspicd.dsk
NOTE: If aspicd.dsk does not work, unload it and
load it again. The first load initializes the host
adapter; unloading and reloading allows the initial-
ization to complete.
3. Load cdrom.nlm as follows:
:load [pathname] cdrom.nlm
4. Enter the following line at the prompt, and then
note the number and name of the CD that
appears:
:cd device list
5. Enter the number and volume name of the CD at
the command line:
:cd mount [number] [name]
The CD-ROM is now ready to be accessed as a
volume.
Optimizing Performance
The Adaptec 78xx SCSI bus master firmware increases the
SCSI performance of the Adaptec 78xx Family host adapt-
ers under multitasking environments. The firmware uses a
paging mechanism to handle up to 255 simultaneous SCSI
commands. The sequencer can simultaneously manage up
to 32 tagged, or 2 nontagged, SCSI commands for each
SCSI device, up to a limit of 255 SCSI commands. The
firmware can queue as many commands as the operating
system is able to send to the host adapter. To set this fea-
ture, enter the following command:
max_tags=n
In general, a low number for the max_tags option gives
better sequential performance. This value varies with the
level of random disk accesses and drive characteristics.
NOTE: A large value for max_tags can cause starvation
problems with some drives.