[rescue] Sun SBus serial cards

[Dave McGuire]

On 7/13/23 22:57, Jonathan Chapman via rescue wrote:
> 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.

   At Diged, we used Livingston Portmaster PM2E-30s, dozens of them, 
before we moved to PRIs terminated in Cisco AS5200s.  We had probably 
150 of those.

   We too started out with Sun ALM-1 boards.  We looked at ALM-2s, but 
we were annoyed to learn that they only have modem control on the first 
four ports.  After a while, we moved to net-booted Sun-3/100 machines 
running custom code (a replacement for /sbin/init that I wrote) that 
made them essentially act as terminal servers.

               -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA