More on the EtherPortII cards

[Jim Jagielski]

Just to add a little more info to the EtherPortII card thread:

There are two versions of the EPII card out: The Old One and the New One :)

The Old One was put out by Kinetics and was based on the Intel chip. It is a
full size NuBus card. Kinetics supplied drivers for this card designed to
run under A/UX 1.1 and 1.1.1.

The New One was put out by Kinetics/Novell but they was soon thereafter bought
by Dayna Communications. If you buy a Dayna EPII card, then this is the one
you get. It, however, is based on the National chip. The card itself is smaller
and when I upgraded I DID see a performance increase. Dayna has drivers for
this card to run under 2.0.

Now the catch: the drivers for the 2 cards AREN'T INTERCHANGEABLE. This means
that if you have the OLD CARD, you MUST use the 1.1 drivers. Dayna has NO
PLANS AT ALL of writing 2.0 drivers for the old EPII card and the drivers they
have don't work with it. Furthermore, even if you have the New Card, they still
charge you $49 for the 2.0 drivers !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There have been conflicting reports on the use of the Old EPII card and the
1.1 drivers running under 2.0. Early in 2.0's life, we received word from
Apple that as long as you didn't use EtherTalk over the card, the 1.1 drivers
would work (that is, you could only use the card for TCP/IP). My own exper-
ience was fine, once I increased NMBUFS. It should be noted that I have 32
megs... some of the problems encountered with the old drivers seemed to be
on systems with 4 megs.

My suggestion, if you have the Old EPII card is to get the drivers (available
via anon-ftp on my machine) and try them out. If they don't work then get
another card. Even though I'm using the Dayna card, I wouldn't buy one simply
because of the way they're leaving the old EPII card owners in the dust (some
would say that Kinetics/Novell are also to blame, but they DID sell the EPII
card to Dayna... ). I would have liked to offer the new EPII drivers via anon-
ftp also, but the fact that Dayna CHARGES for them leads me to believe that 
such an action would be a legal no-no.

Of course, we could all wait for the new Mac Tower with it's built-in Ethernet!

:):):)
--
=======================================================================
#include <std/disclaimer.h>
                                 =:^)
           Jim Jagielski                    NASA/GSFC, Code 711.1
     jim at jagubox.gsfc.nasa.gov               Greenbelt, MD 20771

"Exploding is a perfectly normal medical phenomenon. In many fields of
 medicine nowadays, a dose of dynamite can do a world of good."