Dell System V Release 4

[Andrew H. Marrinson]

morris at hssiarl.uucp (Morris Forbes) writes:

>The only real problem I found was with the installation of their TCP/IP
>using a WD 8003E and tying to a thick ethernet drop through an external
>transceiver.  The self configuration they have builtin to the system
>does not appear to handle thick ethernet properly (they tell me it 
>works fine with thin).

I don't think this has anything to do with thick vs. thin.  It has to
do with old vs. new WD8003 cards.  Newer WD8003 cards have an EEPROM
in which you can store the shared memory address once and it remembers
it from then on.  Older ones don't have this, instead the driver must
tell the card the shared memory address at boot time.  We originally
used an older card on thin Ethernet, and had the same problem you
described.  When we switched to a newer WD8003 (and maybe programmed
its EEPROM with a DOS utility from WD) the auto-configuration worked
fine.

>  The solution was fortunately simple - just
>modify the wdn file in /etc/conf/sdevice.d/ and rebuild the kernal.

Yes, this also works.  Note that they point out that you must do this
for the 16 bit WD card (in the one manual you do get with DELL V.4).
I think that is because that card doesn't have the EEPROM.

In general I was also quite pleased with Dell's V.4.  I wish they were
a little more flexible about non-Dell hardware, although I can
understand there reticence to support it more fully.  We are using
non-Dell hardware ourselves, and I don't think we are having any
serious problems because of this, but it does make me nervous that
support might be refused at any time because of this.

It will be interesting to see what Interactive does...
--
		Andrew H. Marrinson
		Icom Systems, Inc.
		Wheeling, IL, USA
		(andy at icom.icom.com)