romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us (John Romkey) (12/03/88)
There've been a few questions lately about multiport serial cards, so I thought I'd share my experience with the Comtrol Hostess 8 port card. This card is available with 4 or 8 ports. It's a dumb card, with no local processor, and it occupies a half length board (the 8 port card has a daughterboard on top with the second group of 4 ports). The board has two thick cables coming out the back that connect to a box with the serial connectors. The default is female DB25's. I believe that DB9's and modular jacks are also available, and there are several other options than RS232. If you're wondering about those, you better call up Comtrol and ask them. You can jumper the ports for a variety of interrupts and base I/O addresses. It comes with a pretty good manual, a DOS disk with a test program and a loopback connector. Xenix has built-in support for it. Varied support for other operating systems exists; ask Comtrol about it if you're wondering. After I rejumpered the card for the base address Xenix wanted (which I found out through both the Xenix "mkdev serial" command and the Hostess documentation), I installed the card as "COM2" with no problems. My first test was to boot Xenix, and it came up and said COM2 was a Hostess board with 8 ports. Great. I ran the DOS test under DOS and it worked fine. So far, I've only run it with one terminal hooked up to it - eventually it will have a couple of 9600 baud modems and several other terminals hanging off it, too. So I haven't managed to stress-test the card very much yet, but it's performed quite well so far. If I have any problems once I start loading it with a couple of other devices, I'll send another note in to the list. Finally, the ports are all configured as DTE, and you can't change this. It's a bit of a pain for me; I have to rebuild my cables for the terminals that are being hooked up to it - my old 1 port COM2 was set up as DCE. Also, each port does support the modem control lines, although I haven't tested them well yet - I have seen them go on with a breakout box, though, but the terminals aren't paying any attention to them. The 8 port Hostess board lists for $695 from Comtrol Corporation NW 4001 PO Box 66117 St. Paul, MN 55166-0001 612 631-7654 800 333-1033 I have no association with Comtrol. I'd feel uncomfortable calling this a recommendation as I haven't managed to test the Hostess card under any heavy load yet, and I'm kind of paranoid about it - I really expected something to go seriously wrong when I added an 8 port card, and so far I've had exactly 0 problems, so I keep expecting one to come up. So please treat this as merely a report of my experiences with the board, and use it for informational purposes to draw your own conclusions. -- - john romkey romkey@asylum.uucp romkey@xx.lcs.mit.edu romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.