[c-nsp] Re: merging 2 flashes into one filesystem

[Jared Mauch]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 02:10:07PM -0600, Brian Feeny wrote:
> 
> Jared,
> 
> What you say makes sense, but when Rodney said RSP4+ supported  it but
> RSP4 did not, that confused me because certainly at the very least I  
> guess
> its documented in the release notes that the boot code supports ATA.
> 
> Also, I thought the only real changes between RSP4 and RSP4+ was the  
> addition of parity memory,
> apparently there is more too it, or what we are talking about is some  
> sort of crippleware that looks for
> the hardware id and makes a feature work or not work.

	No, this is a feature of the ROMMON.

	I'm not sure if the rommon is socketed, but i suspect that
later versions of the rsp4 support it, but not all, hence the
documentation and official support say no :)

	if you have a eeprom burner you could probally copy it, but
you would run into copyright law issues as you are likely not
authorized to do so.. 

	I ran into this issue as we were attempting to upgrade some of
our cisco devices, and they said we needed the rsp4+ or rsp16 to do the
ata..  instead we decided to decomm the routers for numerous reasons, this
being one of smaller issues, and migrate everything to a 7200 in these
locations instead.  It didn't provide the same "redudndancy" as you could
get in a 7500 w/ dual RPs, but the dual RP situation in the 7500 isn't
that great anyways as you need a cbus stall.. (none of this is news :)

	anyways, hope this helps make things a bit more clear for those
of you out there..  cisco won't "support" it, but it's possible to make
it work..

	just don't expect them to help you out with flash failures
if you have them, but if you're smart enough to do this, there
is a chance you won't be calling them for such a simple issue.. but make
sure you document it internally, so that if you ever leave or are replaced
your company doesn't hate you after the fact that you're using an "unsupported"
config when they run into trouble.. :)

	- jared

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.