[rescue] SunSwitch

[Jonathan Katz]

Nick wrote:
> I've actually got one inbound, new in opened box, however for the right
> price I'd be quite willing to sell it again <grin>.  But really what I'm
> looking for is details.. who is it what is it why is it.. wait that's not
> right.  I've got a 3524, how does it compare (other than the obvious -16
> 10/100 ports)? etc etc etc

New in box? These are circa 1997.

OEM made by Alteon for Sun. I actually built the firmware for those
suckers, so I'm kinda attached. They work really well. You should be
able to d/l the firmware for them from alteon.com. They do both inband
(assign it an IP and telnet to it) management, management via SNMP and
management over the serial port. I think with the latest Alteon firmware
it will do layer 3 and 4 switching, too.

Here's the gotcha. These are IDENTICAL to the ACESwitch 110s with the
exception that the link/activity lights are swapped. The Sun has them
with link on top and activity on bottom and it's the opposite on the
Alteon branded ones. (I may have it backwards, but that was the only
difference aside from the faceplate.)

Because of the locale of the LEDs different if you want the latest
and greatest firmware, you'll have to deal with backwards lights.

They have dedicated MIPS R4400s (two per port) to handle tx/rx.

If you take it apart the 2nd gigabit NIC is actually a PCI card and
you can drop it in another system so you can do gigabit from that
system to the switch, and then 10/100 from the switch elsewhere.

You can put an ATM card in that PCI slot and it should work, as
well :)

-Jon