Help: Problems with Sun SBus Serial/Parallel board...

[Gray Watson]

I posted some quieries about SBus terminal boards to the net a while back
and got some good replies. I will be summarizing in the near future, as
soon as I do (or do not) find a solution to my present problems.

I finally chose the Sun SPC (Serial Parallel Controller) board.  It may
have been a mistake.

I want 8 more Sun internal ports.  No dialin/out cababilities and the like
needed.  I mostly have terminals plugged in to my Sparc.  My my modem
software only needs the standard SIGHUP and CD detect signals to work.

PROBLEM:

I am having some serious flow control problems.  Example: emacs
/etc/termcap (read-only) and hold down the left or right arrow keys.
After a few seconds emacs is beeping saying "Buffer is Read-only".  What
is happening that the arrow escape code is loosing the escape so emacs
thinks I typed OC (or whatever).

The system is also crashing.  I came down this morning (we installed it
yesterday) and the machine was hung.  It crashed 2 times yesterday and the
ports crash individually also.  No syslog messages.  Of course we *do*
have a big project due Wednesday :-|.

PLEA:

I would be interested in talking to *anyone* who is successfully using the
Sun board with 9600 or 19200 baud text terminals.

BACKGROUND:

Sparc 1+ running SunOS 4.1.  SPC driver as a loadable device. Wyse 185
terminals with normal settings, standard null-modem cables (2-3 3-2 4-5
5-4 6-20 7-7 8-8 20-6), ms=crtscts in gettytab, soft_carrier and
str_assert in stc_defaults, NO XON-XOFF!!

Apr 13 10:27:37 larry vmunix: stc0: CD-180 Firmware Revision Level: 0x81
Apr 13 10:27:37 larry vmunix: spif0 at SBus slot 1 0x0 stc_pri 9, ppc_pri 5

Possible problems: I am not running Xon-Xoff, my null-modem cables (above)
are not like the ones in the Sun manual at all (2-3 3-2 4-8 5+6-20 7-7 8-4
20-5+6 !?!?!?).  Aside from this, I have not #&$^$*@% idea what the #&&$$(
is going on.

Thanks,
gray
gray%antr.uucp at med.pitt.edu