[SunRescue] Help with IPC serial ports...

[Peter Koch]

Hi!

>I've never even attempted to use a Sparc with a modem as in Internet
>gateway. The serial ports (as you have discovered) suck.

I used a Sun 3/60 as Internet-Gateway with a USR Courier V.everything.
And it worked! I think you guys are running the wrong OS on your
machines. OpenBSD, NetBSD, Linux... what do you expect???
These Operating Systems are not a bit optimized for the hardware.
You'd better go with SunOS or Solaris. At least, the Sunnies know      
their own hardware... mostly.

>The serial ports (as you have discovered) suck.

Sure. But my 3/60 could handle the load of 4000 interrupts per second
and still spend some cycles running Squid and sendmail. Working under
X was not possible, when the Modem pumped data into the serial port
with 38400 baud.

Another thing: Sun never made hardware handshake work under SunOS.
They promised it in every jumbo tty patch, but to no avail.
Interestingly enough does hardware handshake work on the older
Sparcs under Solaris! So this surely was a software problem!

Then i remembered an Usenet Article that was posted years ago
in c.s.s.a where a guy said he'd fixed this annoying problem.
I found the article, send an e-Mail and voila... the guy was
still online and sent me the patch. Since then i never lost a
character again...

Hey: That 3/60 was a fine Internet gateway! And surely the 3/60 is
ten times slower than a IPC! The other hardware is basically the
same. I'd try SunOS or Solaris and see, how these would handle
the load on the serial port. I bet: much better than the others.

Tschuess

Peter