Original post
ISA modem board and pc peripherals
I'd like to put a high speed fax/modem board in an ISA slot in a pci
based work station running dec-unix. Finding a board is the easy part,
but what about drivers? The provided DOS driver is of little use (isn't
it?). I'm not very familiar with the PC world, but a rom bios driver
embedded on the board also seems pretty useless (unless the alpha
includes an x86-PC emulator).
Does anyone have experience with installing a modem board into an
ISA slot and hooking a driver into digital unix. More to the point,
is there a digital-unix driver available that is compatible with common
fax/modem boards? I've looked through the driver man pages and browsed
the net a bit, but can't find any pointers to *drivers* relating to the
plethora of ISA boards out there. We're contacting board vendors, but
the chances of them providing a driver seems low.
This really *is* a great list... Thanks.
See the end of mail for some info on off the shelf serial boards (many
ports) with unix drivers, software package suggestion and question
on where to find "ace" documentation.
Adding the fax modem board was very simple, the kernel supports standard
PC serial ports. But i didn't get everything that i wanted. I had to
disable the COM2 serial port in the process.
Here's the procedure i used to install the fax/modem board as COM4/tty01.
Find the documentation on "Console Commands" and check out isacfg. For the
system i installed on, the isacfg command is found in the manual:
"Digital AlphaStation 250 Series -- User Information". There are several
builtin "scripts" that run isacfg for you. I used one of the builtins.
isacfg is used to configure eisa devices as well.
Halt and power down the system, install the board (in this case a "USRobotics
Sportster" 28.8Kb) with jumpers set as COM4 and irq 3, power on and to the
console prompt i entered
>>>add_fax
The above disables COM2. I could instead have sacraficed COM1 (the 250 has
a graphics head) and gotten a tty00 by doing something like
>>>isacfg -mod -slot 0 -dev 2 -enadev 0
>>>isacfg -slot 3 -dev 0 -mk -handle COM3 -irq 4 \
_> -iobase 3e8 -etyp 1 -enadev 1
Boot the system, during boot i saw
Configured: serial unit 1, type=16550A
ace1 at isa0
The "Configured: ..." message seems to be related to overiding the built
in COM2 port. Unit starts at 0 of course. The ace driver figured out
what type of uart was on the board.
So at this point i should have had tty01 being the faxmodem board.
For a simple test i added to /etc/remote
com4:dv=/dev/tty01:br#19200:pa=none:
I tip'd to com4 and tried "at"
walrus# tip com4
connected
at
OK
So everything went OK. Since the "OK" came back from the board i
assume interrupts work (don't know if that is checked during boot).
Related stuff:
I had intended to keep COM2 available, but it appears that the ace
driver (serial driver for standard PC serial ports) only handles
two active units. I could find no man pages or documentation on this
driver. I thought i'd be able to set the modem board address to something
like COM4's but then set the IRQ to one of the unused IRQ's, but since
the driver seems to support only two units....
Rather than screw around experimenting i just let COM2 be disabled.
There was a suggestion about a software package for further investigation
from Bob Wier.
.... I belive there is a package called flexfax
which runs under Unix - AND it runs under Linux
A few suggested contacting DigiBoard. They seem to have a variety of
boards *and* drivers for dec-unix. Their mail tells it all:
We've been using a DigiBoard with great success. It comes with drivers
for Alpha OSF/1 and Alpha-specific installation instructions. It actually
worked first time!
-- scooter
You may want to contact DIGI BOARD. I have installed their 16
lines mux to for our bar code readers.
Arun Sanghvi
Received on Mon Aug 21 1995 - 05:13:48 NZST