Subject: Re: Sun 3/50 as a net peripheral
To: Clarence W. Wilkerson <wilker@hopf.math.purdue.edu>
From: Kevin P. Neal <kpneal@pobox.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 12/01/1996 18:22:08
At 12:48 PM 12/1/96 -0500, Clarence W. Wilkerson wrote:
>
>We have a stack of 3/50 and 3/60 bases in reserve. Unfortunately, in our
>application of them as X-terminals, the monitors seem to die long before
>the CPU's, so we have an excess of the bases.
>

My 3/60 is slowly losing it's ethernet. I'm using the AUI port now, because the
internal transciever is just about dead.

>Instead of thinking of them as workstations, I'd like to be able to
>access their 2 ( or 4 ) serial ports, and scsi port over the ethernet.
>

Two. Four? Just two.

>2) How crazy would it be to try to drive the pins on the scsi port to 
>use as a parallel printer port. If not impossible, how fast could 
>this be?

Bleah! Parallel doesn't use termination in the normal SCSI sense, if at all.
Yuck.

>3) If not, how about a more intelligent scsi -to - printer interface?

Why not get a serial-to-parallel converter? Have the machines boot from a
disk, or netboot, and provide an interface to the serial ports across the
network?
A program that would run on a network port and talk to the serial port when
a connection to it was made?

Oh, and why was this cc:'d to port-sparc? I bet they don't want to hear this,
so somebody can remove it unless it's really wanted. 
--
XCOMM Kevin P. Neal, Sophomore, Comp. Sci. -   kpneal@pobox.com
XCOMM     http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/       -   kpneal@eos.ncsu.edu
XCOMM "Comments in code are kinda useless, anyway."
XCOMM   -- Brian Rumple, TA for my OS class, NCSU. November 6,1996