wstef@beta.eng.clemson.edu (W. Gregg Stefancik) (02/17/89)
I just received an Excelan EX0S 205T ethernet card for my IBM-PC and have been astounded to find that there are no public domain drivers for this card available. Why is this particular card shunned from the world of NSCA Telnet, KA9Q, etc? If there is no good reason why, I guess I'll have to write the driver myself. The boards technical information is currently enroute to me. W. Gregg Stefancik < wstef@eng.clemson.edu >
romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us (John Romkey) (02/18/89)
The reason there's no public domain software is that Excelan normally ships the boards with their own resident TCP and all the public domain software has its own internal TCP and the interfaces on each different piece of software are quite different. So it's never been worth the effort to anyone to hack up the public domain stuff. Also, the smart Excelan boards cost more than similar performance dumb boards, and most people who like to run the public domain software like cheap boards, too... - john
wstef@ENG.CLEMSON.EDU (02/18/89)
I figured that price and the internal TCP-IP were the main reasons why drivers did not exist. I've found the TCP-IP supplied with the Excelan board is not as studly (full featured) as some of the public domain stuff available. Assuming that the board does not prevent one from setting up the board to do "external TCP-IP" or feed a program at a lower level than the socket level, then writing drivers for the public domain program of my choice should be no problem. I'm anxiously waiting on the board level documentation. Gregg wstef@eng.clemson.edu