following-on from my earlier question about resurrecting an ancient Intergraph 6800 machine (licence file for extra logins on ancient Unix (CLIX) system), the original problem was a failed hard disk so This Must Not Happen Again. All the crucial data are on the separate /usr partition so I was wondering about making the file system more robust. On a modern system this would be trivial but on this ancient Unix it's something of a challenge.
One option would be mount /usr on a separate, modern machine with RAIDx but the NFS client software is a separate licensed option and I don't know if anyone can provide us with a a licence nowadays.
The CLIX software doesn't include any kind of meta-device software like Sun's md subsystem that lets you treat multiple raw devices as one.
So I wondered: is there anything like a SCSI-2 box that appears to be a single target but in fact contains redundant disks ?
Another option might be to compile an old version of the Samba client software on the machine but it's starting to get a bit tricky.
The fallback option is to pull the crucial data off via FTP from time to time but that's a bit low-tech and I suspect that the procedure to do so would be neglected.