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From: James A. Robinson Jim.Robinson@Sta...
Subject: Building a new Plan 9 system.
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 19:17:57 -0700

< No secret, that was me.  I adapted the mach64ct driver for the ATI Rage
< family of chips, but the update may not have found its way back to the
< FTP site yet.  I'll supply Jim with an updated aux/vga, and also a b.com
< and kernel which should get him going on a 4.3GB IDE disk.

Thanks for the updates!  For some reason, b.com/9dos didn't like my PC,
and it crashed. :(  However, I just went and yanked an old 2.0Gb IDE 
drive out of one of the soon-to-be-retired workstations, and that worked
just dandy.   

Since I don't yet have an ATI xpert@work card, I went and dug up a S3
Trio64 (Well, Trio64V2).  If anyone out wants to use a "Venus 64V2,"
here is an id string that sort of works:

	0xC004A="S3 86C775/86C785 Video BIOS. Version 2.04.09-1"

That let me do 1024x786x1 (no 8 bit above 640x480 worked properly). But
that's good enough to know that I want to continue my experiment with
Plan 9! So, I'm about to go start buying equipment for my setup, and
I'll order a copy of Plan9 via Amazon.com so I can actually take a look
at the source (and perhaps figure out how to make this junky little Trio
card do higher res/color).

Do people have recommendations or cavets about fileserver and cpu server
hardware? From yesterday, I learned that I should be careful about the
IDE boot disks -- max 2.0Gb, right?  Do I have to worry about size on
the SCSI disk that the file server will use?

Any recommendations for PCI SCSI? Buslogic seems like a good idea, and
from what I've read on the list it seems like the 956c is supported. What
about the Busmastering 958 cards (I've got one at home in my linux box,
and it seems like a nice card).  Forsythe, I don't think I'd be able
to use the Adaptec, because I don't think I'll be getting any VLB 
capable motherboards.

I was thinking of something along the following lines, and I'd like
to know if I'm either not planning on enough, or am going overboard,
when it comes to RAM and CPU power for the various components. The
Terminal is going to be stand-alone (no other OS on it):

	Motherboards: Microstar MS-6119 (400BX)
	(Tom's Hardware page says it is very stable)

	CPUs:	Terminal:	 PII 233Mhz (64Mb SDRAM)
			File server: PII 266Mhz (128Mb SDRAM)
			CPU server:	 PII 400Mhz (256Mb SDRAM)

	Disks:	CPU & Terminal: 1.0Gb E-IDE (or smaller, if I can find them!)
			File server: 1.0Gb E-IDE, 1 IBM Ultrastar 4.5Gb
						  Buslogic 956? BT-958? Adaptec 1542C? Not sure...
			
	Video:	CPU & File: Generic Trio64 (1024x768x1)
			Terminal: ATI Xpert@Work (1600x1200x8)
			
	Network: 3com 3c509 combo cards
				
And I guess I need to get a CDROM drive -- what should it
be hooked into? The File server? The Terminal? The CPU
server?


Thank you,

Jim