Re: firewire 800 trouble

[Adam L. <th...@cs...>]

> Strictly spoken, IEEE 1394 support should not be enabled on a critical 
> machine.

Is there any indication of when this will change, if it indeed will 
ever change?  Is there a 5 year plan?  Or is Firewire pretty much 
considered moot, and everything will be USB2?  (Well, when USB2 is 
operating reliably, I guess.)

Personally I've found all this very, very frustrating from a user point 
of view: we've actually moved one server over to an xServe running Mac 
OS X Server, from Linux on a Dell PowerWhatsit server, because the 
external firewire hardware-RAID-5 box was such a vital part of our 
plan, and it didn't work reliably.  (And the SCSI one, drives included, 
cost significantly more by itself than both the Firewire box, drives 
included, and the xServe together.)

We bought another xServe to use as a backup machine; we would have gone 
for a cheaper machine with Linux and external firewire drives (needed 
the hot-swap ability for taking backups offsite) but we didn't trust 
Linux's firewire support and Windows (if we'd even considered it) would 
have added umpteen thousand dollars to the price of the system.  (Other 
hot-swap possibilities were either SCSI, which would have driven the 
price through the roof, or SATA, which just plain wasn't available on 
rack mount servers in our price range at the time; even today it's hard 
to find a x86 server with front-mounted SATA hot-swappable drives that 
is anywhere near the price we paid for the xServe ($2000 including Mac 
OS X Server Unlimited).)

I'm not trying to gripe at anyone who is putting in unpaid time trying 
to get firewire to work on Linux; I'm just wondering if we are actually 
progressing in a forward direction any more, or if I should just start 
looking for other solutions besides firewire, at least where Mac OS X 
isn't an option?

Adam Lang
Xythos Software, Inc.