[rescue] Sun SBus serial cards

[Mike Spooner]

The obvious SBus cards for direct  async serial expansion were the Magma 4SP, 8SP and 16SP cards. However, due there being not enough room on an SBus backplate for so many DB25 or DE9 sockets, such things used custom (serial-wired) RJ45 sockets on the card itself or breakout adaptor boxes on a 96-pin D-shell connector from the card itself. Which might explain the OP's unfamiliarity with the connectors on the card itself.

Of course, in the case of the 8SP or 16SP cards, you *need* the matching breakout box, and some ebay sellers don't realise that.


- - Mike S.

PS: I have the Solaris 2.4/2.5/2.6 driver diskettes for the Magma 8SP cards around, somewhere, and I might have the SunOS 4.1.3/4.1.4 drivers, too.

14 Jul 2023 12:06:05 am Doug McIntyre via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>:

> On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 06:20:38PM -0400, Mark Price via rescue wrote:
>> I am looking for a SBus serial card to use on a Sun4m system.  If anyone
>> has one they'd like to donate/sell/lend, please let me know :)
>> 
>> The only serial-related card I see on ebay is listed as "high speed" which
>> I'm guessing is not applicable to my use case (RS-232 modems) and I don't
>> recognize the connector port.
> 
> So, you need more async serial ports than the two that came on the system?
> 
> Async serial cards were pretty rare in general. While there weren't none, companies
> did tend to make lots of things for lots of markets, including custom Sun S-Bus async serial.
> 
> Most likely the listing you found was for a Sun HSI card, which in general was
> synch serial for supportint X.25 connections. Probably not what you are looking for,
> but was very common so there are lots out there.
> There was the SAI (Serial-Async) card, but I had never seen one in the wild.
> 
> What most people did needing more async serial ports than 2 was to run a terminal server
> box over the network, such as the Xylogics or Cisco ones.
> We had some MicroAnnex XL Xylogics boxes (8 or 16 ports).
> Connect up a bunch of modems into the MicroAnnexXL box, and then
> they could be setup to telnet/rsh into the Sun box automatically when dialed into
> once the user authenticated via whatever method (probably RADIUS).
> 
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