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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