We currently have a 10 megabit link to the outside through our coax,
which runs to an fddi Decswitch, which i believe is a DecSwitch 900. The
folks in the computer center who run the main campus loop of FDDI have
basically offered to run the line the extra 35 meters or so, assuming we
can get a card up and running on this end. what we'd like to do is run a
DEC FDDI board in place of one of the 3c905 cards, if and only if we can
procure a driver for the card.
A driver exists in the FreeBSD CVS tree, handily broken up into
OS-Dependant (for Free, Net, and BSDI) and purely hardware code. It
appears that it would be fairly simple to hack on a Linux frontend and
have a fully functional driver for this card. if we can't get a driver
working, then we might (GASP) have to use the evil NT as a fallback.
I'd like any pointers to drivers I missed, etc. This card appears to be
completely different from anything else we have drivers for, since it has
a CPU, its own DMA, and a meg of RAM on the card.
I think they're pretty new cards, as well as pretty uncommon. The DEC
page says that all cards from this line are built to order, with a 45-day
lead time. Not to mention the fact that they're $1200 each from DEC,
about $1000 from resellers..
I'm willing to work on this driver, and think I know where to borrow a
card for a while. Maybe someone with more experience with netcard drivers can
gimmie a hand... =)
Alan? Don? Help? ;)
Later,
Elijah
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ewright@multipro.com
Tennessee Tech University
Water Center Systems Administrator