henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (11/27/86)
Has anyone ever tried adding the Excelan VMEbus Ethernet board to a Sun-3?
On paper it looks possible. We may have a requirement for which it would
be very desirable to put a *smart* Ethernet controller on our 3/180S. It's
not clear to me just which controller Sun sells as its add-on one, but some
things in the manuals hint to me that it's the old 3Com unintelligent one.
This doesn't thrill me. Being able to download TCP/IP into the Excelan
board is of particular interest to us. Any experience with this particular
combination, or similar alternatives? For that matter, any experiences
with using the Excelan board (or equivalents) with TCP/IP on board?
Please respond by mail; I will summarize for the net.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henrymelohn@sluggo.sun.COM (Bill Melohn) (11/29/86)
In article <7355@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes: >Has anyone ever tried adding the Excelan VMEbus Ethernet board to a Sun-3? >On paper it looks possible. We may have a requirement for which it would >be very desirable to put a *smart* Ethernet controller on our 3/180S. It's >not clear to me just which controller Sun sells as its add-on one, but some >things in the manuals hint to me that it's the old 3Com unintelligent one. All Sun-3 models except the 3/5x use the Intel 82586 Ethernet chip. The 3/5x uses the AMD 7990 lance chip. Both of these are "smart", and being located on the CPU board have a speed advantage over external cards.
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (11/30/86)
> All Sun-3 models except the 3/5x use the Intel 82586 Ethernet chip. The 3/5x > uses the AMD 7990 lance chip. Both of these are "smart"... These chips are "smart" only in comparison to the "dumb" ones; they can't do, say, TCP/IP internally. The Excelan board can. > ...and being located > on the CPU board have a speed advantage over external cards. The discussion is about add-on controllers, however. The on-board controller on our 3/180S is committed to an internal, secure Ethernet with all nodes under our control. The application under consideration is an Ethernet linking us to the outside world. We consider it unacceptable for packets from the the former, including things like private data and unencrypted passwords, to go out on the latter. So we need two controllers. I should add that one speculation in my original note was wrong: the Sun add-on controller once was the 3Com one, but it's now a Sun-built 82586 board presenting an interface very similar to the on-board 82586 (the same driver serves both, I am told). -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry