19 Oct
2006
19 Oct
'06
2:46 p.m.
Dave Dunfield wrote:
Why does it have to be RS-232 or IP - does nobody
remember plain simple
ethernet anymore? (almost as simple as RS-232 - way faster).
A fair point. Wonder what the complexity is like at the 'client' end for the
most common OSes though? DOS I imagine is easy because you can pretty much do
what you want - but I wonder how hard it is to talk raw Ethernet from
user-space applications for OSes like Linux and Windows?
Agreed that a full IP stack is a pain for an embedded device (I believe Phil
Blundell's done some work with IP stacks and ARM devices, though). For
something built from an off-the-shelf redundant PC though it'd be easy, with
the exceptions of how to do the IP address assignment / discovery.
(For a data recovery type of scenario, I expect several different drive types
will be needed anyway - so the bulk of a PC PSU / motherboard / case is hardly
an issue!)
cheers
Jules