[rescue] Sun SBus serial cards

[Jonathan Chapman]

Grex (formerly grex.org / cyberspace.org) ran a modem pool hung off Sun hardware for a long time, started out on a VME ALM board, but they pretty quickly realized sun4 wasn't having a great time with the load it presented and went over to a terminal server. So, if you're thinking you will actually have some traffic on your dialins, you probably do want to look at a terminal server!

The Xyplex servers are pretty OK, they have some issues with incoming (Ethernet originate -> serial port) telnet connections from some modern telnet clients. I haven't dug into it but it's likely the modern clients sending telnet params it doesn't like -- it hard reboots the terminal server though! They were also packaged as modular terminal servers by Synoptics for their LattisNet series.

There's a pretty wide variety of terminal serving options out there, Lantronix made a bunch starting with a single port and going up to many. There's a Cisco 2500 series terminal server, though the cables usually cost more than the box. DEC made some pretty nice ones, many are LAT only though, and the newer ones tend to be stupidly expensive for some reason.

Watch with the Magma cards and the breakout boxes: there's 8-conductor RJ breakouts, and 10-conductor RJ breakouts. If you get the latter, and plug in an 8-conductor (your usual RJ45 like used on Ethernet), you'll destroy the connector.

I have a SBus Magma 16-port with the breakout (8-conductor kind) I could be convinced to part with, I've run it under NetBSD/sparc on my SS10 but didn't find it all that useful.

Thanks,
Jonathan

------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, July 13th, 2023 at 22:13, Mark Price via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:

> Hi Doug,
>
>> So, you need more async serial ports than the two that came on the system?
>
> Yes, I'm starting an ISP with dial-in modems, and I currently just have a Sparcstation.
>
>> 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.
>
> I think you're right, I found the manual for the Sun HSI card, and it can't speak "low speed" serial RS-232.
>
>> 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).
>
> Thanks for the tip, I'll check into Xylogics.. I actually have a Xyplex terminal server, but it has been a total pain to work with. I know Cisco had the AS5300 with digital modems, but I'm not familiar with their other terminal server options, I'll check it out.
>
> Mark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://sunhelp.org/pipermail/rescue_sunhelp.org/attachments/20230714/c61364f2/attachment-0001.html>