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Date:      Mon, 18 Mar 1996 09:04:13 -0600
From:      "Eric L. Hernes" <erich@lodgenet.com>
To:        Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Cc:        erich@basenet.com (Eric Hester), freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: comtrol rocketports 
Message-ID:  <199603181504.JAA04029@jake.lodgenet.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 16 Mar 1996 09:45:46 CST." <199603161545.JAA24201@brasil.moneng.mei.com> 

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We've been bombarded by serial vendors in the last 4 months or so.
We are currently buying digi pc/8e's; we buy between 75 - 100 cards a month
for our systems.  We're in the process of migrating from SCO
to FreeBSD.  We've talked to digi, stallion, equinox, and comtrol,
and maybe others.  The salesman from comtrol was really excited about
his card and wanted to send an engineer up to visit us and really
show off their cards,  I told him that he'd do better to get me a FreeBSD
driver before he sent an engineer here; we haven't heard from him
since :(

At any rate I've personally seen the following intelligent serial
cards work:

Digi:
     PC/8e -- works quite well from what I've seen;  a little more cpu
              intensive under FBSD than SCO, but works good.  I've used
              both 64k and 8k windowed cards.

Stallion:
    EasyConnect AT and PCI --
              works very well, driver is actively worked on by a stallion
              employee!  I'm gonna push for a switch to this one when
              we finally make the switch to FBSD.  These support up to
              32 ports from one isa/pci slot.

    EasyIO -- This is the moderately intelligent card based on the
              Cirrus CD1440 chip.  The card is very similar to the Cyclades
              8Y, RJ12's off the back (probably available in db{9,25} too).
              this card is cheap $200/8ports.

Cyclades:
    8Y --    I've seen it work.  Didn't really beat on it, but it works.
             It's in the $200 price range.

I've seen a few messages regarding the comtrol cards.  Someone (julian?)
indicated that comtrol isn't too bad a company to work with as far
as getting programming specs and sample sources.  Getting a working
driver should only be a 2-3 week project provided one is a driver hacker,
and has access to hardware and docs; oh yea and has that much
free time.  ;-)

eric.

--
erich@lodgenet.com
erich@rrnet.com




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