[rescue] USB / Firewire

[Jonathan C Patschke]

On Friday, Oct 18, 2002, at 20:42 US/Central, Michael Schiller wrote:

> I have a strange question. I have a Sonnet Tango USB/Firewire card that
> I got for my Mac. For some reason the USB portion of it didn't seem to
> work in my mac, so I took the card out, and in it's place I put in a 
> DEC
> DEFPA FDDI card. It also didn't work properly in my mac, so I'm 
> starting
> to think that my mac might have a problem with it's PCI slot.

Do the other slots work?  Is the slot dirty?  It kinda sounds like 
you're getting 3.3V but not 5V, or the other way around.  Check the 
leads from your system board to the power-supply and check the pins in 
the slot for dirt or corrosion.

> But the question is this: The Tango card has openfirmware on it, so I
> was wondering if I installed it in my U30, would solaris recognize it
> properly?

Not without quite a bit of OFW hacking.  Macintoshes and Suns have 
different OFW dictionaries.  I really wish that weren't so, since I 
thought one of the big wins of OFW was supposed to be that the host 
machine doesn't have to know much about the card at all to make it Just 
Work.

> I know that Solaris 9 has both firewire and USB drivers in it, and I
> was wondering if it would be able to use the Tango card? Anyone have
> any thoughts on this?

The other cards that I've tried this with did not work.  I suspect that 
if you know Forth and have fairly deep knowledge of both the Macintosh 
and Sun dictionaries, it'd be fairly straightforward to write a piece 
of Forth code to save in nvram to act as a compatibility layer.

--
Jonathan C. Patschke
Celestrion Information Systems
Thorndale, TX