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.

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Dell 2100/180, 2100/200 manual Using the NetWare Tape Backup Utility, Setting Up a CD-ROM Drive With Net- Ware 3.12 or

2100/180, 2100/200 specifications

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