Hack & dev wish list

[bbraun]

/ Split from: Official XMAS Wish List 2011 - Bunsen /

My wish list is a bit unorthodox, but as long as we're wishing...

Wish list:

- A SCSI target - iSCSI initiator dongle, either wired for performance or wireless for mobility would be nice.

- WebDAV file system implementation (either FST or File System Manager style).

- A wifi card for the Duo modem slot. Or similar Duo wifi solution.

- A nubus or LC PDS development card with EEPROM decl rom, LEDs, GPIOs and any other goodies anyone wants to throw on.

- A diskless booting solution along the lines of The Diskless Mac and Boottoob ROMs for ethernet cards.

For trade:

Any assistance, material or otherwise, I can provide to the above projects.

 

[Bunsen]

- A SCSI target - iSCSI initiator dongle

A what now?

- A wifi card for the Duo modem slot. Or similar Duo wifi solution.

That's doable, if you have monies. Serial to wifi modules are around, some that appear as Hayes AT modems at the serial end. Not exactly cheap though. There have been threads here discussing wireless Duos (insert usual search prompting here), and Sparkfun have the modules/ICs.

- A nubus or LC PDS development card

Hey now... Not a bad idea at all. Esp with an FPGA onboard.

- A diskless booting solution

Also not a bad thought. Do you have any informative links on the two you mentioned?

 

[bbraun]

- A SCSI target - iSCSI initiator dongle

A what now?

I've wanted a SCSI "disk" that is really an iSCSI initiator that reexports an iSCSI target over a local SCSI bus. Basically a SCSI to ethernet/wifi to fileserver. It would be one solution to the diskless booting problem. The inverse is commonly available for people that have SCSI disk arrays and want to export them as an iSCSI target. But I've never seen the direction I'm looking for.

- A diskless booting solution

Also not a bad thought. Do you have any informative links on the two you mentioned?

Here's a tidbits article on TDM:

http://tidbits.com/static/html/TidBITS-094.html

From what I understand, they were ROM replacements for existing ethernet cards that would retrieve an image at boot, copy it into RAM, and present it as a bootable RAM disk. This seems to indicate the TDM solution could use AppleShare and something "unix compatible" (presumably tftp or nfs) for the image retrieval. Apparently some schools used it for easier administration.

 

[Bunsen]

I've wanted a SCSI "disk" that is / Basically a SCSI to ethernet/wifi to fileserver. It would be one solution to the diskless booting problem.

Hmmm. Perhaps a modification of Micha's homebrew SCSI RAM disk, replacing one (or both) of the AVRs with a newer micro with ethernet/wifi onboard.

ROM replacements for existing ethernet cards that would retrieve an image at boot, copy it into RAM, and present it as a bootable RAM disk.

Well now, that is an interesting thought. Have you been following dougg3's epic ROM hacking thread?

 

[bbraun]

I have. I'm getting two of them this week (thanks dougg3!), and a PLCC32 to DIP32 adapter for my burner.

It may be possible, later in the ROM boot process, to use an ethernet card's .Enet driver registered from a decl rom to directly drive a card. Grabbing something over TFTP wouldn't require a very complicated IP stack, retrieve an image to RAM, and then plug in my existing ramdisk driver. Or even better, figure out how to pass it off to the builtin RAM disk driver.

This is somewhat related to my current (slowly ongoing as time allows) project of trying to present a file located on an HTTP server as a block device to Mac OS, and doing ranged gets & puts. Doing the ranged gets & puts is easy using MacTCP, and the block device is easy using my existing ramdisk driver implementation. Making calls to Mac OS libraries from within a driver are problematic, so I'm currently trying to rework my MacTCP accesses around that, and I'll see how it goes. I'm hoping you can just drop a vmac/basilisk ii/sheepshaver disk image on an HTTP server and mount the disk from a physical mac.

 

[techknight]

Hmmm. Perhaps a modification of Micha's homebrew SCSI RAM disk

and Micha's code isnt compatible with the macintosh SCSI system. I dont know why, but it is not. which is the main reason my project died as it was based off of his stuff.

 

[Bunsen]

That's a darn shame :/

Here's a tidbits article on TDM:http://tidbits.com/static/html/TidBITS-094.html

There's also a link in that article to a brief description of Boottoob.

OK, next question- what's a WebDAV file system? Am I right in thinking it's related to the other projects?

 

[bbraun]

It's on my long list of projects to get to someday, but if someone else wants to get to it first, that'd be rockin'. The goal is to mount a WebDAV share (dropbox, idisk, your own server, or mobile devices like airstash) as a regular disk from within the Finder. AppleTalk usually isn't bridged by AP's and wireless interfaces these days, so mounting AppleShare isn't as convenient, particularly with setups like my pb540c's wifi hack. So, WebDAV seems like a modernish alternative that is nearly ubiquitous.

My initial research on the subject indicates the old style filesystems for MacOS were all through File System Translators, which as I understand it were kind of a hack (also how initial ISO 9660, MachTen's NFS, and all early non-MFS, non-HFS filesystems were implemented AFAIK). Apple introduced the File System Manager to make it a more supportable interface. FSM was included in System 7.6, but was available separately and worked on System 7.0 on. Developers could license it from Apple for redistribution with products that used it and wanted to work on

My current project of trying to present a file over HTTP as a local disk was initially intended to be a transition project between the memdisk driver and a webdav filesystem. Write some ranged HTTP put & get routines, throw it in the memdisk driver, move on. But nothing is ever that simple, and I've been trying to work through some of the difficulties of that idea.