I had two questions. In brief:
(1) is the onboard ethernet on an AlphaStation 255 10/100BaseT or
just 10BaseT, and
(2) how do you select which media (AUI or twisted pair) a DEC 10/100
Fast Ethernet card uses (again in an AS255), since mine was
picking the wrong one.
As for (1), the consensus is that the onboard Ethernet is just
10BaseT. I feel better about buying the Fast Ethernet cards now. :-)
(I'd been confused because the kernel messages seemed to suggest they
were the same controller.)
Dave Golden told me
You can tell from the console mode (>>> prompt) by doing a
"show config". If one of the PCI options is a 21140, then
you have a 10/100 interface. You can kick it into fast mode
by using the console command "set ewa0_mode fast". Of course
this assumes you have a 100 base T network hub to plug into
and someone to talk to at 100.
and sure enough, one of the controllers is a 21140 but the other's
a 21040.
As for (2), in the PROM monitor, at the ">>>" prompt, type
set ewb0_mode Twisted-Pair
(It had previously been set to AUI). There are lots of variables
associated with the Ethernet controllers, you can see the current
values by doing "show ewb*" or "show ewa*" (or "show ew*" to show
both of them; in my case that scrolled off the screen). On my
machine ewb0 was the add-in card, and ewa0 was the onboard controller;
that confused me a bit because under Unix, the add-in card is interface
tu0, and the onboard controller is tu1 (different order).
I figured out that the string to set 10BaseT was "Twisted-Pair" by
seeing what the corresponding value for ewb1 was. (There wasn't
anything about this in any of the paper documentation I had on the
machine, and the manual that came with the board didn't say anything
about configuring it under anything but DOS! :-( It's probably covered
in online documentation somewhere.) A couple people told me I'd need
to set this to "Fast" rather than "Twisted-Pair" to use 100BaseT.
(I haven't tested this.)
Robert L. McMillin <rlm_at_syseca-us.com> pointed out that if you want
to know legal values for a PROM variable you can just do "set <var_name>"
without a value, so
set ewb0_mode
would have told me the legal values. (Unfortunately, for _most_ variables,
this actually sets the variable to the null string. My guess is that's
actually what it's trying to do for everything, and the list of legal
values is an error message.)
Many thanks to
Cliff Krieger <ckrieger_at_latrade.com>
"WHITTAKER, Bruce" <bjw_at_ansto.gov.au>
"Robert L. McMillin" <rlm_at_syseca-us.com>
Greg Hollard <gregh_at_timdc.govt.nz>
"Dave Golden" <golden_at_falcon.invincible.com>
Cheers,
Jay
<jay_at_ccs.neu.edu>
Received on Wed Jan 22 1997 - 22:20:54 NZDT