ewv@violet.berkeley.edu (Eric Varsanyi ) (03/26/88)
I recently had the "pleasure" of installing an 8 port Intelliport board on my uport 386 system, here are a few hints and tips in case anyone out there is evaluating this product for their system: General info ------------ The Computone Intelliport is a 4, 8 or 16 port intelligent serial board. Up to 4 boards can be installed in a system, giving a theoretical maximum of 64 ports. The board has an 80186 and some RAM, therefore it handles all the per character interrupts and only has to interrupt the 386 for full lines of input (At least I hope that's what they did in their driver, anything else would be a waste. Their manual is devoid of any useful technical information). They have a feature that allows you to use terminals with 2 pages of memory like the console (you can switch between the two pages and have different sessions on each one). I've been using this feature and its real handy, there are two entries in /dev for the two virtual screens so its reasonably transparent to the system. It is possible to confuse the terminal and end up with the output getting sent to the wrong screens. This feature is completely programmable, so you can set up any terminal with two pages of memory (that will switch on some command received from the serial port) to work with this feature. They also have a feature that lets you use the printer port on a terminal via another entry in /dev that is more or less transparent to the terminal user. The overall quality of the hardware is good, the board and cables are sturdy. The jumpers are located so that you have to take the board out of the system to get to them (they are down near the edge connector). Problems installing on uport V386 --------------------------------- 1) DosMerge does not work The sales people at Computone claim that you can run applications such as Wordstar and Paradox. The tech support people claim (correctly) that the board does not work with DosMerge applications. 2) There is no modem arbitration There is no arbitration between ttyixx and ttymxx lines (like there are between tty00 and ttym00 under the standard uport serial driver), therefore you have to resort to various bogus methods to have a port usable for dialin and also be able to use it for tip or kermit. (Edit inittab each time, use (blech!) uugetty, etc...) 3) No working terminfo entries are supplied Computone tech support recommends that you use their product with a Wyse 60 terminal, they supply termcap entries (!) to use their board with a Wyse 60 (the regular one does not work). Since System V does not support termcap, this does not work too well. Tech support informs me that no terminfo entries are currently available, and that I use the terminal in TVI925 mode (Good thing I got this nice AT compatible keyboard for my Wyse terminal). There are other problems with Wyse 60 mode as well. (later) I tried to use captoinfo to convert the termcap entry to a terminfo entry with marginal success, the resulting terminfo entry works ok until you hit ESC twice in a row, then you end up getting hex representations of what you type echoed back at you (from god knows where). There's no way out of this, you have to kill the vi or whatever you were running. 4) The driver hangs intermittently If a port is opened and there is no board present (the install script creates /dev/ entries for all possible 64 ports, even if you only have 8), the process opening will hang (at some wait channel in the driver) until system reboot. This also happens if you access a port and there is no terminal plugged into it. 5) Terminals that produce scancodes do not work Scancode producing terminals (Wyse 60's for instance) will not work with this product. Turning on scancode recognition has no effect. (Note: You can still use a Wyse 60 or Kimtron but you have to put it in ASCII mode) 6) Can only be installed on IRQ15 If you have something that uses IRQ15 (like DosMerge) you are out of luck (This is NOT documented, their tech support told me). 7) Poor Documentation The documentation was written for SCO Xenix, one page was added with uport and VP/ix installation instructions. Their install scripts build your kernel from system.std (if you are using something else you are out of luck and have to manually install). 8) Tech Support not available for users Their tech support is not available to end users, you are directed to call your dealer. The dealer cannot get tech support either, he is directed to call his distributor. The distributor can call Computone with technical questions. Most distributors have a nice warehouse and order taking department. Need I say more? Conclusions ----------- The concept and hardware are excellent. The software implementation for uport (and for vp/ix systems I suspect) is poor. The system will not install out of the box without a good deal of tinkering. They claim that all the above problems will be solved with their next revision of the driver that should be out in about a month. Considering the quality of the software and the skill of the tech support department with uport systems, I would judge this to be an immature product for uport systems, not to be bought unless you are willing to tinker around quite a bit and lose some of the functionality of your hardware. The tech support person stated that their main market place was Xenix and maybe they had jumped into the uport and vp/ix markets too early, I agree. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Eric Varsanyi ewv@violet.berkeley.edu !ucbvax!violet!ewv Any opinions expressed are mine and are not necessarily those of Cray ----------------------------------------------------------------------------