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iSCSI on Windows 98 ? [Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator 1.x versions]

doshea said:
This is the way I'd go, if I was going to try something like this. It might necessitate a larger "tweener" machine as I'm not sure if you can buy parallel SCSI adapters for modern machines, but I imagine the parts are a lot easier to obtain. Then there's the possibility that on the tweener machine you might be able to use https://ipoverscsi.sourceforge.net/ (which probably requires an old Linux kernel and hence an older tweener machine) and only have to write custom software for one end.
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Hah! I'm impressed you were able to dig up that old fossil; I kind of wanted to say that ip-over-SCSI was a thing that people had (in the weirdest of extremities) done before, but I wasn't willing to dig long enough to find it. If you're willing to put the grunt work in you'll find all sorts of weird schemes for cramming IP onto not-really-made-for-it mediums. For instance, a thing that had a bit of traction for a while was IP over HIPPI, it even made it to a draft RFC. (SGI was playing with it for doing crazy-fast LANs between clustered Origin supercomputers.) IP over UltraSCSI feels like, I dunno, a really redneck version of the same idea?

An interesting wrinkle in the description of this project is it requires SCSI cards that are capable of acting as both an initiator and a target at the same time. That raises an objection to an iSCSI bridge that I hadn't even thought of, because I don't think there's any way you can put an initiator behind one of these bridges; it's kind of a non sequitur if you think about it? I mean, I guess in theory someone could have made a bridge that could be configured to map initiator requests coming from a specific SCSI ID to a pre-configured remote iSCSI host, but unless you could find such an animal I assume you'd be stuck having to have the remote host running the initiator constantly sending polls to the end behind the iSCSI bridge to see if it has anything to say and initiate the data transfer from its end.

doshea said:
Good point. Can you read/write a hard drive on a PS/2 at 10Mb/s? I wonder what a PS/2 could even do with 10Mb/s - I presume it can generate and/or sink test data packets at that rate so people can tell what the performance of a network card is, but perhaps if you want to actually display data on the screen it won't be fast enough to do that?
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The fastest way to view a modern web page on a PS/2 would probably be to use a VNC-style screen scraper or an X11 server to control a browser running on a computer actually able to render it. Sure, you'll get a little lag, probably a second or two to refresh the window because you'll be pushing a lot of uncompressed pixel data, but a fast 386 or 486 is going to handle that a lot more gracefully than it would trying to grok HTML5. Or SSL.

(Back in the mid-late 1990's I used to display Netscape Navigator running on a computer across campus on a humble 68030-powered hardware Xterminal over 10base-T networking, and it was, well, fine. And it wouldn't be much worse today, assuming I were connecting to a faster computer running the browser.)
 
mbbrutman said:
A P133 with a PCI card can get around 10MB/sec through the card using standard Ethernet frames with a LinkSys LNE100. I've seen a Pentium 4 with a RealTek 8139 based card push 11MB/sec. The P4 is quite a bit faster but you can see it barely helps.
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A weird edge case for Fast Ethernet is I used to have an old Xircom PCMCIA (not cardbus!) "Fast Ethernet" card; PCMCIA is basically ISA, so that card was essentially throttled on the bus side. It didn't show on the 486 laptop it was originally paired with, but I'd say it was less than half as fast as a CardBus 10/100 card when plugged into a faster laptop.
 
Well. The MCA system is a Model 90, W98SE [for now], Y complex [Pentium 180 upgraded], 64MB or so, SCSI-2 F/W. No difference in the planar of ANY Model 90, they are all equivalent. The "modern" system is a Dell 7010 Mini Tower, Win7, 1Gb Ethernet on-board. i7-3770 @ 3.40 GHz, 12GB RAM, both USB 2.0 and 3.0 available. It does have a selection of PCI and PCIe slots. One long held plan was to do FDDI with a DEC PCI SAS card, but Win7 doesn't do that. HSTR [or ANY T/R] is out. ATM would require setting up a network. The 9-K card would work, not brilliantly, but it would work. Parallel PCI SCSI cards do exist, from looking around, Qlogic had iSCSI cards.

Scraping is a thing, someone did just that using a Python script on a newer Apple system so as to feed the system with an older browser.

I never bothered with iSCSI out in Cows-Moo-Politan southern Wisconsin, RAID was another thing I didn't need. But I don't have many high speed choices coming out of MCA.

I ran NetScape Navigator 4 on the net a few years back with a LAN/A, slow, but as long as you didn't have to render big images or script, it was fine. Google at that time was pretty well behaved as far as text layout was concerned.

I do have a HIPPI, odd you should ask ;)

One possibility would have been pFsense on a small device, FE on board, PCI slot, a DEC Tulip FDDI card, some arcane incantations, and waa-laa, FE. I'd stuff an FE card in the 7010 and leave the Gb connection to the internet alone.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Hah! I'm impressed you were able to dig up that old fossil; I kind of wanted to say that ip-over-SCSI was a thing that people had (in the weirdest of extremities) done before, but I wasn't willing to dig long enough to find it.
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It was just in my history because I ran across this thread on VOGONS when looking for my own post there regarding iSCSI on Windows 98 :biggrin:

ardent-blue said:
Y complex [Pentium 180 upgraded]
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Oh wow, that's a bit faster than what I normally imagine when I think of a PS/2!

ardent-blue said:
One long held plan was to do FDDI with a DEC PCI SAS card, but Win7 doesn't do that.
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Can you directly connect two FDDI SAS interfaces without a concentrator?

ardent-blue said:
Parallel PCI SCSI cards do exist
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Yes, there are definitely a lot of those, it's PCIe I'm not so sure about.
 
doshea said:
It was just in my history because I ran across this thread on VOGONS when looking for my own post there regarding iSCSI on Windows 98 :biggrin:
Oh wow, that's a bit faster than what I normally imagine when I think of a PS/2!
Can you directly connect two FDDI SAS interfaces without a concentrator?
Yes, there are definitely a lot of those, it's PCIe I'm not so sure about.
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Yeah, quoting seems to be the main product of the web...
The P, Q, and Y complexi can be upgraded with intel overdrives. Got to be very precise with WHICH overdrives... A little wiring is needed to connect the fan, plus you might wish to add a heat sink or two to the VRs. If you want to see the guide, Upgrading the P90 Complex The P60 and P66 complexi are similar, but obviously need other Overdrives.
You can connect FDDI adapters directly, but the Fiber versions have those little clips to set them as A, B, or M [something like that]. The Copper UTP version [CDDI] doesn't seem to be affected. Unfortunately, the OP that helped set that up is no longer available. I'm not a network savant, either.
The Dell has three different types of slots. PCI, PCIe, and one other, don't care, it's not germane.
 
ardent-blue said:
Proxy server, yes. But I still want all the speed I can get... Unsafe at any speed...
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Maybe you should experiment with a more conventional machine that's easier to get a fast ethernet card running in and see if higher link speed actually makes any difference. Color me skeptical it will with a machine as slow as a 180Mhz Pentium overdrive.
 
I thought of a perhaps slightly less crazy, slightly more practical idea, if you "need" more network bandwidth (for browsing or just for having the best PS/2 ever :LOL:): link aggregation/bonding. I don't know if Windows 98 would support it though. Apparently it did support multilink PPP, so perhaps there's some way to get it to aggregate other types of connection?
 
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