How to upgrade from Solaris 8 x86 HW 10/01 to HW 05/03 ?(USB-related)

Preface: Yes, this is an older production system which is working just
fine; the problem is additional disk space on the box. I have
attached an external USB to the OEM USB port (USB 1.0), formatted the
drive to UFS, and everything works nicely. Reading/writing is very
slow, however, due to the transfer speed on the USB 1.0 port.

I bought a USB 2.0 PCI adapter from Addonics; they advertise that it
works with Solaris 8 x86 if patch ID 109897-20 or later is applied.
Reference
http://www.addonics.com/products/hos...controller.asp

Naturally, this was too easy -- the Addonics PCI to USB adapter will
not work. I have determined that the patch noted above is not quite
enough -- the USB kernel infrastructure required (USB Dual Framework
w/ USB2.0 support) was introduced with Solaris 8 x86 HW 05/03. Hence,
there are USB-related driver files in HW 05/03 that are not in HW
10/01, which I have.

(cww100)$ cat /etc/release
Solaris 8 10/01 s28x_u6wos_08a INTEL
Copyright 2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Assembled 13 September 2001
Solaris 8 Maintenance Update 7 applied

(cww100)$ patchadd -p | grep 109897-20
Patch: 109897-20 Obsoletes: 109315-03 109342-01 109875-01 111529-03
113422-01 Requires: 110610-04 109884-01 108529-29 Incompatibles:
Packages: SUNWaudd SUNWaudh SUNWcsr SUNWcsu SUNWmdb SUNWuaud SUNWusb
SUNWusbu


Note that I have run PCA against this machine and it is *completely*
up to date w.r.t. Sun's released Solaris 8 x86 patches (all of them,
not just the recommended and security ones).

So, my question:
How do I "upgrade" the USB infrastructure such that this install is on
par with Solaris 8 x86 HW 05/03?

ps:
Since someone is bound to ask, no, this is not an easy machine to
upgrade -- even via live upgrade or any other approach. This host is
a telemetry hub for a county-wide stream, lake, and river water level
monitoring system. The plan is to move the operations to a newer
system in about a year when a new building is completed. Until then
the disk space problem above prevails.

Thanks much.

in article <7825a941-d6cd-42bb-a0c2->,
writes:
> Preface: Yes, this is an older production system which is working just
> fine; the problem is additional disk space on the box. I have
> attached an external USB to the OEM USB port (USB 1.0), formatted the
> drive to UFS, and everything works nicely. Reading/writing is very
> slow, however, due to the transfer speed on the USB 1.0 port.
>
> I bought a USB 2.0 PCI adapter from Addonics; they advertise that it
> works with Solaris 8 x86 if patch ID 109897-20 or later is applied.
> Reference
> http://www.addonics.com/products/hos...controller.asp
>
> Naturally, this was too easy -- the Addonics PCI to USB adapter will
> not work. I have determined that the patch noted above is not quite
> enough -- the USB kernel infrastructure required (USB Dual Framework
> w/ USB2.0 support) was introduced with Solaris 8 x86 HW 05/03. Hence,
> there are USB-related driver files in HW 05/03 that are not in HW
> 10/01, which I have.
>
> (cww100)$ cat /etc/release
> Solaris 8 10/01 s28x_u6wos_08a INTEL
> Copyright 2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
> Assembled 13 September 2001
> Solaris 8 Maintenance Update 7 applied
>
> (cww100)$ patchadd -p | grep 109897-20
> Patch: 109897-20 Obsoletes: 109315-03 109342-01 109875-01 111529-03
> 113422-01 Requires: 110610-04 109884-01 108529-29 Incompatibles:
> Packages: SUNWaudd SUNWaudh SUNWcsr SUNWcsu SUNWmdb SUNWuaud SUNWusb
> SUNWusbu
>
>
> Note that I have run PCA against this machine and it is *completely*
> up to date w.r.t. Sun's released Solaris 8 x86 patches (all of them,
> not just the recommended and security ones).
>
> So, my question:
> How do I "upgrade" the USB infrastructure such that this install is on
> par with Solaris 8 x86 HW 05/03?
>
> ps:
> Since someone is bound to ask, no, this is not an easy machine to
> upgrade -- even via live upgrade or any other approach. This host is
> a telemetry hub for a county-wide stream, lake, and river water level
> monitoring system. The plan is to move the operations to a newer
> system in about a year when a new building is completed. Until then
> the disk space problem above prevails.

I wouldn't use USB for any serious data.
If system has IDE drives, do you have the ability to add another
onto an existing bus/channel?
Otherwise, I suggest you find a supported SCSI card and add a SCSI
disk.

Then you don't need to upgrade, either.

(Unfortunately, I doubt there's any way to add SATA onto Solaris 8.)

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]