Scsi network between PC and Amiga possible?

[Gulliver]

Is a scsi network between PC and Amiga possible? Is it possible to use TCP-IP over it?

If feasible, how should both systems be setup?

Any help in this matter is apreciated

[lsmart]

Why would you want this? For speed reasons? SCSI is not ideal for networking, as it is highly dependant on device IDs and usually quite slow in discovering hot-plugged stuff.
I have used IP over firewire on a Mac and that was very fast, but if I just wanted to copy some files over "Target Disk Mode" was superior.

So maybe you`d be better of if you´d get your "networked" computer to pretend it´s a normal HD. Well, I am not sure, if there is software for that feature at all. Maybe it also depends on the brand of host adapter you are using.

What are you trying to network? Connect a vanilla Amiga 3000 to an Adaptec board? Is the PC running MacOS X, BSD, Linux, Windows XP or AROS?

[Gulliver]

I am trying to setup a Siamese RTG 2.5 system, to connect a PC with an Amiga.
Docs mention the scsi network possibility, in fact being faster than the ethernet one.

I have an A1200 with a BlizzardPPC 603e+, so I have a really fast scsi interface that easily outperforms any Amiga ethernet, well at least in theory. I also have an ordinary Windows 7 PC to which I can easily buy a suitable scsi adapter for this purpose.

The problem resides in the fact that I have never set up a scsi network, and besides the Siamese software, I would also like to use a TCP-IP stack every now and then between the two computers.

Am I asking too much? Or is this possible?

Thanks

[Zac67]

Don't know what software support there is but technically it's possible. Way back I've used a SCSI HDD to transfer data to/from the PC with only a single SCSI bus connected to both computers. Of course both systems didn't know of each other, so I had to use a dedicated FAT partition and diskchange on the Amiga side after PC changes and vice versa with an undocumented Ctrl-C on the MSDOS side.

As always with SCSI you need to make sure that
- termination is proper (exactly two terminators on the the ends of the bus, active ones highly recommended)
- each device has a unique ID - this goes for the host adapters ("controllers") as well (I changed my 3000 to 6 with SCSIprefs)

The rest depends on what software you want to use.

[psxphill]

The problem resides in the fact that I have never set up a scsi network, and besides the Siamese software, I would also like to use a TCP-IP stack every now and then between the two computers.
 
Am I asking too much? Or is this possible?

Yes & Yes
 
RFC2143 suggests a way to do it, but I've only found linux drivers. You'd need AmigaOS & Windows 7 drivers.

[lost_loven]

would this help?
http://aminet.net/search?query=scsi+network

lost

[Zac67]

These don't look like anything TCP/IP to me, they're pretty much about what I mentioned above.

[joekster]

I looked really, really hard into this about 10 years ago. It is theoretically possible, but has not been completely done. I found some linux "stuff?" that partially implements a tcpip stack - but it is so far from useable. If it hasn't been done with linux, I'd bet the farm that it's not going to be done on windows and definitely not on amigaos. My guess would be that it would take 20,000 - 50,000 development hours per platform. So unless you want to dedicate yourself for the next 20-50 years or pay several million $, it's not going to happen...

[Gulliver]

Thank you for your answers so far. I am going to try to read that documentation, and see if somehow it is practical and usefull for my setup.

BTW, I have just noticed the Siamese software offers Picasso 96 drivers

[Xanxi]

Thank you for your answers so far. I am going to try to read that documentation, and see if somehow it is practical and usefull for my setup.

BTW, I have just noticed the Siamese software offers Picasso 96 drivers

I'm very curious to see how the Siamese work for RTG. I have one with an ISA board somewhere but never had the chance to use it so far. I would have to revamp my old PC from 1999 to get an ISA slot.

[Zac67]

My guess would be that it would take 20,000 - 50,000 development hours per platform.

Actually, writing a SANA-II driver tunneling the data over SCSI can't be this tough. On the Linux side it should be doable as well, the hardest probably being a Windows port. But then again, why not just use a normal NIC?

[Gulliver]

@Zac67

A normal NIC should be pretty easy, but then performance will not be as good as scsi.
I can (in theory, guesstimate) use my ethernet at 1MB/s and my scsi at 10MB/s, not only that, but that scsi is low on cpu usage even when working at full speed.