oattes@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu (Lee Oattes) (12/10/87)
I am interested in knowing whether any one out there has had experience
in connecting more than two ethernet boards to a micro-vax (Q-bus)
running Ultrix 2.0. The application is to use such micro-vaxen as
gateways between many ether(sub)nets (ie. more than two!). As it is
now, we can only use each micro-vax as the gateway between two ether
networks and it would definitely be nice to have more capability to
handle more ether networks without having to purchase more micro
vaxes! The standard deqna boards have switches for only two csr
addresses, though the device driver will allow more than two. Is there
any trick to get around this? It seems a little silly to allow only two
deqna boards (?).
An alternative would be to install another type of ethernet board with
its own driver. Does any one know of any such products? We have considered
the Interlan NI2010 board, but Interlan only supports device drivers for
the multibus. Has anyone developed an Ultrix device driver for the Q-bus
for this board?
Any suggestions would be welcome.
--
Lee Oattes, University of Toronto Computing Services, CTS.
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INTERNET - oattes@gpu.utcs.toronto.edukarels@OKEEFFE.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike Karels) (12/13/87)
We are using a Microvax II with 5 ethernet interfaces and a DMV-11 56 kbaud serial interface as a gateway. It's running 4.3BSD, not Ultrix. (I would strongly recommend the use of 4.3; Ultrix IP code is based on the 4.3 alpha release from July 1985, and the IP forwarding and option handling and ICMP received a lot of work after that time.) Our configuration includes two DEQNA ethernet interfaces and three Excelan interfaces; we're obviously using the "world box" BA123 cabinet, as the BA23 doesn't have nearly enough power for all of this. Use of more than two DEQNA's would require modification of the board, and is clearly not worth considering. (I suspect that the limitation is due to the FCC radiation limits already mentioned.) In addition to the Excelan and DEQNA interfaces, 4.3 includes drivers for Interlan NI1010 and NP100 UNIBUS interfaces; at least the latter has a compatible Q-bus interface. (I doubt that there are Q-bus controllers that are compatible with the 3Com or DEUNA/DELUA UNIBUS interfaces, although we have drivers for those, too.) Our Microvax gateway has been very reliable; it recently went down when a hardware tech was rearranging cables after 126 days up. Mike