Date   : Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:54:15 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Domesday Preservation

Rhys Jones wrote:
> The setup took a while to get right - the first Adaptec 2940UW card I 
> tried did not detect anything, but then one bought off ebay (a Compaq 
> branded 2940UW card) showed up the LV-ROM as drive D: during the boot 
> process, but would complain that the device had no name etc. The 
> Camileon documentation said that they needed linux 2.4.7 to get the 
> LV-ROM working, and I iterated through a few linux distros to end with 
> Redhat 7.1 finding the drive under /dev/sg0.

Hmm, that's extremely interesting... that must have been about the time that a 
lot of the SCSI mid-level code was rewritten such that it'd 'hide' devices 
that it didn't think were fully SCSI-compliant. Worth knowing, as I've got a 
whole slew of such devices, but I got tired of randomly trying older kernels 
in the hope that one would work!

> The RS232 code was much easier - a small python program talking to 
> /dev/ttyS0 would send the FxxxxxR command to go to a frame, check that 
> the LV-ROM got there, and then run mplayer to grab a png of the image. I 
> found that the LV-ROM would over-skip some frames, so needed the 
> explicit check and re-try to be sure of the right one.

Interesting. I did find an old email from Adrian Pearce earlier which said it 
took 3 days of solid running to get the data off :-)

> [1] http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/99941/repnet/casestudy.html

Thanks - I was just grumbling elsewhere that I couldn't find any of the data 
any more (it never was particularly "Googleable"!)

cheers

Jules