david@ukma.UUCP (David Herron, NPR Lover) (04/03/85)
Does anybody know anything about these people in general? We're looking to put in an ethernet between all our machines. Which includes a Vax-11/750, 2 Intel multi-bus, 80286 machines, and 4 AT&T 3B2's which are going to be hooked to a 3Bnet of 17 other 3B2's and a 3B20. (A gift from AT&T ya see). We are badly needing the Vax to be on the 3Bnet. Or at least have some way for the 3Bnet machines to talk to the Vax at high speed. CMC makes some ethernet boards which are IEEE 802.3 compatible. They provide (on board) levels 1-4 of the ISO specs, offering either TCP/IP or XNS protocols. They have a 68010 on board, and do DMA to deliver packets to the host. They claim this gives a high throughput, 6 MBPS between boards and 1 MBPS between processes. Which is believable from what they describe. One question is, "Are these quality products from quality people?". "Will TCP/IP from this board (or others) at least co-exist with 3Bnet?" [My understanding is that the 3Bnet protocol uses very large packets (4K) instead of the 1-2K packets used in TCP.] "If you have bought one of these boards, would you buy another?" "What problems did you have?" "Any other questions you would like to answer?" BTW, AT&T people claim that 3Bnets will co-exist on the same cable with other flavors as long as they all talk IEEE 802.3 on the cable. But I was told from another source that the controller for the 3B20 had a bug in it which caused some severe problems if you did this. ADVThank you very muchANCE