🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2006-07-21, Craig Ian Dewick <craig@jedi.apana.org.au> wrote:

> Is anyone aware of a maker of Sbus serial port cards which still has 
> current operating system support? I am aware that Sun dumped Sbus support 
> when they released Solaris 10 so whatever is left over in Solaris 9 is 
> probably as good as it gets.

Sun hasn't dumped SBus support. They have dropped some device support
however I've got a pair of Ultra-2 boxes that are very much alive. Most
of the "dumped" items include such stellar items as 10Mbit ethernet
and crusty narrow SCSI chipsets, neither of which sits well in a Sol 10
machine anyway. Sun hardware has depreciated so much in the last few
years I'd consider an Ultra-60 a minimal play machine now.

> Failing being able to use a Sun Sbus card to add serial ports, the other 
> option is completely rebuilding the machine with an alternative operating 
> system such as NetBSD which does apparently support the Magma Sbus cards 
> natively.

I believe the Sun serial cards still work fine, so that'd be the best
option. They couldn't possibly cost more than $20 second hand including
the external box and cabling.

> The only other possible solution which is going to be doable at little 
> cost is to get something like a Cisco 2509/2511 or a Lucent Portmaster 2, 
> and use that to manage modems indirectly to the server machine. That's 
> something I would have done in the past when I had more than a handful of 
> modems running full-time with active dial-up connections, but now there is 
> only two modems.

Keeping the Sun theme, a Xylogic/Bay/Nortel Annex should also be near
worthless these days.

If you can't find any of the parts, I'm pretty sure my box o' Sun bits
would have the required parts which I'd be happy to dispose of at beer
compensation rates, mostly to cover the hideous queues in the post
office.

-- 
Andre.