umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Charles Carlson) (04/08/91)
Over the weekend I bought a couple Puredata Ethernet boards, model PDI8023. The manual states they are compatible with the WD 8003 board, well they're not. I tried to get Lantastic/AI ver 3.03 working with them with little luck. The new WD8003 driver supplied with Lantastic/AI which supports the 16bit cards, is improperly detecting this board as a 16bit board with 16K ram, when its really an 8bit board with 8K ram. I dug out an old version of the WD8003 driver that doesn't have 16 bit support, and it works a little, however its unstable. The workstation will crash about 50% of the time when xfering large amounts of data, such as a 2 meg file, also I am now experiencing many unexplained crashes. All problems go away when I put WD8003 boards back in. Thinking version 3.03 of REDIR and SERVER might not like the old WD8003 driver, I tried version 3.00. Things are much more stable, but still not 100% reliable. I called Puredata tech support this morning, and they confirmed the problem, stating they had several other people calling saying they couldn't get the new versions of Lantastic working with this board either. They had just talked to Artisoft and they are apparently sending them the software to try and figure out whats wrong. I asked the tech support person if these boards are supposed to be WD8003 compatible, he said they are. But it doesn't appear so to me, unless Lantastic is bending some rule on the method to determine what type of ethernet card this is. I would be interested in hearing from anybody who has been able to get version 3.03 of Lantastic/AI working on this board. Charles