Hello all, had a little problem getting OpenBSD to run on one of our machines.
It has a SCSI adapter nicely supported by the ahd(4) driver, but the problem I had was that all SCSI devices would show up, with the exception of - ta dah! - the hard disk. The only one in the machine, supposed to be the boot disk. Now that didn't make installation too easy, but applying some creativity (and, temporarily, an extra ATA drive), it could be done. :-)
The solution was to set the SCSI_DELAY option of the kernel to some larger value (tried 15 seconds, and that worked fine - didn't have the nerve to figure out what value would have been the minimal one which still would solve the problem). This way, the whole SCSI initialization process would pause for a while, allowing the harddisk to turn up.
Now, the whole issue obviously is not really OpenBSD's fault - when a harddisk is too slow to turn up, well, bad luck. What I'm wondering, in any case, is, whether my approach to solving this problem was the right one, or whether there would have been an easier way. I mean, I would have preferred to set some options in UKC or with config(8), but I was clueless as to whether setting the SCSI delay can be achieved this way, or whether building a special kernel was the only approach.
Could somebody please shed some light on this? Is building a new kernel the only thing one can do when one suffers from a too-slow SCSI device, or might there be a shortcut (other than throwing the SCSI adapter and/or drive out of the window and getting a different one, of course) ?
Thanks, Christoph -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
