wescott@LNIC1.HPRC.UH.EDU (Andrew M. Wescott) (04/14/89)
Could someone familiar with IEEE 802.3 hardware and the DN 10000 please answer a simple question for me ? Does the DN 10000 ethernet controller expect a heartbeat or not? I have received both yes and no answers from Apollo SSEs and from 1-800 support personnel. The last answer I got was no, and that is how the transceiver is currently configured. But since I pulled the board out of the VME cage I know it is factory configured for IEEE 802.3 rather than the 1.0 or 2.0 standards. So my gut feel is that it expects a heartbeat. Furthermore, when I do a nodestat -l the output shows I have nearly as many SQE test errors as frames xmitted. My Series 10000 Technical Reference Vol. 4 (Network Controllers) indicates that the SQE test error count represents the number of frames transmitted that encounterd heartbeat absence error. Maybe this makes no difference at all as our ethernet communications work okay. But I am just naive enough to wonder if this has any effect on network performance. Andrew Wescott University of Houston Department of Chemical Engineering