Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!dayton!ems!quest!sheldon From: sheldon@quest.UUCP (Scott S. Bertilson) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: Smart Ethernet boards Message-ID: <981@quest.UUCP> Date: Tue, 7-Jul-87 05:34:20 EDT Article-I.D.: quest.981 Posted: Tue Jul 7 05:34:20 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 10-Jul-87 06:32:28 EDT References: <283@sering.cwi.nl> <8212@utzoo.UUCP> <17346@amdcad.AMD.COM> <365@parcvax.Xerox.COM> Reply-To: sheldon@quest.UUCP (Scott S. Bertilson) Organization: Quest Research Inc., Burnsville, MN Lines: 29 I have to disagree with Henry to an extent. I have been working with the Excelan smart card at the Minnesota Supercomputer Center for about 1.5 years now and although it used to be painful, the card has been free of all but minor glitches for more than the last 6 months. We are running them on 2 VAX-11/750s (SysV.2) and have run 40 telnet sessions on one machine almost every day (this is the only commonly used access to the machine). We talked some commercial customers into looking at them and they found very significant decreases in cpu usage between the card and a Wollongong VMS implementation (primarily testing FTP). We have run the card with connections coming from the ARPAnet, across Bridge GS/3s, and from our local ethernet. The ARPAnet experi- ence showed up a number of early flaws in the firmware which were fixed. My feeling now is that it is the preferable solution for anyone who is stuck on a system that doesn't run Berkeley UNIX. The current Excelan product supplies a socket library (4.1C compatible, not 4.2 :-() which we have used to support things like MDQS and RPC in a production environment. It may only have an 80186 on board, but we have seen performance that is quite respectable when compared to anything short of a SUN-3 class machine. Scott S. Bertilson Minnesota Supercomputer Center Inc. (affiliated w/University of Minnesota) -- Scott S. Bertilson ...ihnp4!quest!sheldon or scott@uc.msc.umn.edu