[rescue] SS Classic Serial ports

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

>Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 23:29:45 -0400
>From: Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] SS Classic Serial ports
>User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i
>
>On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 06:45:46AM -0700, Tom Ponsford wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>> 
>> Actually, using a pcmcia sbus for a serial port works very well.
>> The nell driver on netbsd-current works pretty good. In addition you can use
>> a pcmcia serial card, modem. or even a fast ethernet card. As most of 
>> the pcmcia
>> stuff is peecee compatible, its cheap and plentiful. I got two pcmcia
>> sbus cards on ebay for about 12.00 apiece. So far its worked great
>> in my LX, SS5,SS10 & SS20. As soon as I get time I'm going to use one of 
>> my LX
>> boxes as a dialup gateway/router for my home lan, and another LX box for
>> a wireless access point for my laptop.
>
>That sounds great, if you can get 115Kbps on them.

PCMCIA is capable of the speed, as long as the pcmcia serial card is
capable of the speed, then I'd imagine it should be fine....
(I have not done this myself, although I do have SBUS PCMCIA adapters
and recently aquired an ethernet/serial PCMCIA card that came out of an
old EMC RAID array control laptop ... don't know if any of the Sparc
BSDs or Linux distros support it though... haven't looked into it yet)

>
>I run NetBSD on my SS5's, and I'd really like to boost the speed of my
>PPP connection.

The easiest way might be to use an SBUS PCMCIA adapter and a PCMCIA 56K
modem.

>
>How is the interrupt load on that stuff?

Can't say... I've never done it myself, but someone else here claims to 
have done it.... hopefully they can reply with some more specific info
regarding how well it works.

>
>I didn't even know you could run PCMCIA on the sbus workstations.

yup... and the adapters are getting cheaper and cheaper to get on ebay.

>
>How much as the serial pcmcia card?  Or, was that included in the $12?
>
>
>-- 
>UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza____________________s h a n n o n at wido !SPAM maker.com
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-- Curt