[comp.sys.apollo] AT Ethernet card diagnostic

kint@milton.u.washington.edu (Richard Kint) (07/18/90)

	In the olden days before SR10, the AT Ethernet controller was
shipped with a diagnostic program, which I believe was installed as
/systest/ether_diag.  Now that the driver, etc for the Ethernet card
are bundled in with the OS, that diagnostic doesn't seem to be on the
system.  This was a pretty good little diagnostic, and I sure could
use it right now.  Can anyone enlighten me as to its current status?

Rick Kint
College of Engineering
University of Washington
kint@engr.washington.edu

krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) (07/19/90)

Ether card diagnostics are now part of DEX, the mnemonic debuggers diagnostic
executive program. Shut down your node, type RE to reset the system, type
EX DEX to run the exec (if it asks for a password, try "service"), type run
<name> where <name> is the diagnostic you want.


 -- David Krowitz

krowitz@richter.mit.edu   (18.83.0.109)
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet
(in order of decreasing preference)

dente@craven.ee.man.ac.uk (Colin Dente) (07/19/90)

In article <9007182125.AA08879@richter.mit.edu> krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) writes:
>Ether card diagnostics are now part of DEX, the mnemonic debuggers diagnostic
>executive program. Shut down your node, type RE to reset the system, type
>EX DEX to run the exec (if it asks for a password, try "service"), type run
><name> where <name> is the diagnostic you want.

One additional point: The ether diagnostic requires another machine to be
running the same diagnostic in slave mode - so if you've only got one ether
card - you are, to put it mildly, shafted.  The other ethernet card can
certainly be either another AT bus one, or a VME, but I'm not sure if you
can use the COM-ECMB multibus board (I've only got a multibus in a cranky
old DSP-80A, and I don't let it talk to the ethernet any more.)

Colin


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 Colin Dente                      | JANET: dente@uk.ac.man.ee.els
 Dept. of Electrical Engineering  | ARPA:  dente@els.ee.man.ac.uk 
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krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) (07/21/90)

Colin is correct about the need for a 2nd machine to run
the full set of DEX network diagnostics. This is true of
Apollo token ring cards (and probably the IBM 802.5 cards
as well) in addition to ethernet cards. However, both the
ATR and ETH cards have built-in loopbacks, and a lot of
the testing of the internal circuits can be done with a
single card. Most failures that are not network failures
(loose cables, bad thick ethernet transceivers, etc.) are
caught by the loop back mode diagnostics --- but not
always -:)


 -- David Krowitz

krowitz@richter.mit.edu   (18.83.0.109)
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet
(in order of decreasing preference)