FireWire for laptops

[Bill Campbell]

I need to backup a customer's SCO OpenServer system next week before they
make an office move.  My plan is to do a normal BackupEdge backup to tape,
and to back it up over the network to an external 120GB hard drive
connected to my ThinkPad 600 via a USB connection.  I had done some testing
on the USB backups this way a couple of weeks ago using an ADS external
box, and it seemed to work.

Today I bought an Acom Data external box that handles Firewire and USB 2.0,
plugged it into a Mandrake 9.0 system with Firewire, and it worked fine.  I
tried it on the USB 1.0 port then on a SCO Linux 4.0 (UnitedLinux) system,
but it wouldn't recognize the USB device at all.  I put it back on the
Mandrake box using USB 1.0 where it recognized it as a disk, but when I
tried fdisk /dev/sdc it didn't recognize the drive at all (/dev/sda is a
real SCSI160 drive, /dev/sdb is a mounted FireWire drive).

It appears then that I'm going to have to use Firewire on the laptop (or
get one of the ADS chassis which I know works).  The problem now becomes,
which pcmcia firewire, and it needs to work with a network card in the
lower pcmcia slot.  I have to make sure I have a working NIC since the one
I'm using now is a Xircom that takes both slots.

It appears that there's an Adaptec Firewire card which has a fat external
end, but that will allow a skinny NIC with dongle in the lower slot Anybody
have any experience with these?

Bill
--
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