On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   This problem has gotten so bad that I've started moving away from
> Sun hardware toward Alphas.  Alpha systems running NetBSD have
> excellent FDDI support for the [cheap and available] DEC FDDI cards.

Agreed - Alphas are all-together nice little boxes, esp. with regards to
networking support and stability.

>   As I understand it, the bulk of the problem is that the
> manufacturers of the Sbus FDDI interfaces were complete idiots and
> did lots of the FDDI protocol stuff in the device driver, not on the
> card.  I don't know about you, but I've got *other* work for my
> SPARC processor to do...the network interface hardware is supposed to
> handle the damned wire protocols.  So these Sbus FDDI cards have dumb
> hardware and a HUGE device driver...for [puke] Solaris.

Grumble.  That's a bad thing (tm).  That is very disapointing.  My SS5s
aren't powerhouses, but they're excellent boxes for random dev, firewall,
etc... maybe it's time to move towards cheap alphas for this purpose.

>   So...not only do these folks build bare-minimum
> physical-interface-only hardware, but they don't even release
> programming info for THAT so someone with lots of time and motivation
> could try to write an SMT implementation etc etc to handle one of
> these boards.  *grumble*

Arg.  Definitely not worth it then.  I second your grumble.

>   So now I use low-end to midrange Alphas for the stuff that I used to
> use SS5/10/20 systems for.  I particularly like the AS200, AS255, and
> AS1000 systems, and I just got an AS800-5/333 that I *really* like.
> Slap in a DEFTA/DEFEA/DEFPA board, plug in your fiber, and away you
> go.  Very quickly. :)

You wouldn't know where to get some AS200s cheap, would you :-)

I'm stuck on 3000/300X machines, which are by all means nice pieces of
hardware.  But I've got a particular love for AS200s and AS255s.

Oh well.  Thanks very much for the info.  You've burst my bubble, tho.  I
think I need a cup of coffee now.  And maybe something nasty to
eat.  Something without too much fibre [sic].

-Jon
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
 "Hey - this old machine screams like a snail on acid!" - (a true
  comment by a fellow who recently installed NetBSD on an old server)