morrison@thucydides.cs.uiuc.edu (Vance Morrison) (01/22/91)
Call for Beta-Testers for PCBridge I have just completed the next version (1.2) of PCBridge and now need beta testers to help exercise the new features. For those who don't know PCbridge is a simple but very useful piece of software that can convert a IBM-PC with networking cards into an ethernet bridge. Thus it is possible to assemble for under $1000 a bridge that has better performance than commercial bridges costing $2000 or more. For those of you that are familiar with PCbridge here is a list of new features. Support for the WD8003EBT, WD8013EBT Ethernet cards Support for the WD8003S, WD8013SH Starlan cards The ability to do remote bridging via asynchronous serial lines at baud rates up to 57.6K baud. Support for three or 4 (or even higher!) way bridges. The support for the WD8013EBT card is significant because it can double throughput of the bridge (since it has a 16 bit data path), and its larger buffers will insure that large, fast spurts of data (the kind file servers tend to generate), will not be lost. The beta-test software is available on accuvax.nwu.edu (129.105.49.1) in the directory pub/pcroute/bridge. The files are called pcbridge1.2b.tar.Z and pcbridge1.2b.src.tar.Z and are compressed TAR archives. If you are going to beta-test this software please let me know. Also I am interested in any feedback on the software as well as the documentation. So don't be shy. Please send your feedback to morrison@accuvax.nwu.edu. I have tested the software some myself, but unfortunately I only have WD8003E cards, so I really need people to test this code on the WD8003EBT and WD8013EBT cards. Because this code has never been tried before with these cards, if it fails let me know IMMEDIATELY. I have a simple testing plan that should quickly pinpoint the problem and we can get any problem you have fixed. The remote bridge I have tested quite a bit myself, but I have not tested it for long periods of time so anyone who can do some day or week long testing could tell me valuable information. I wanted to add support for a 56K synchronous board, but I have neither the hardware or the information needed to write the code. If anyone out there wants this capability badly enough to invest a small amount of hardware/money I could probably write it in about 2 weeks. Those of you who also know/use PCroute, rest assured, your turn will come. The beta version of PCroute 2.2 should be out very soon. I basically just need to write up/modify the documentation for the new version. Vance Morrison