386 motherboard, 16 megs, and computone (intelligent serial) board

[Bill Kennedy]

In article <57 at esacs.UUCP> pizzi at esacs.UUCP (Riccardo Pizzi) writes:
>
>>> [ Larry Snyder can't make his Computone card work with 16Mb ]
>
>I have a situation that is very close to your.
>I am running a 3-high-speed-lines BBS and on the same box I do heavily X
>development. My 8 Mb are no longer enough to get satisfactory performance

I encountered this when I went to networking and X and hit a hard stop
at 12Mb.  Everything was just fine when I only had 8Mb but I was not
able to find any address where the AT-8 would work with 12Mb installed.
Mine is a 33MHz caching Micronics and I did disable the cache in the Eth
megabyte and the Computone card worked well addressed in the Eth megabyte.
When I went to 12Mb (which stops in the Bth megabyte) there was no address
anywhere that the Computone would live at and function.  I could disable
caching and have it work OK but that defeated the purpose.  Ditto with an
AMI motherboard, and that one only has 4Mb!  It seems that different
caching schemes and large amounts of memory are more than the Computone
hardware can handle.

The symptom I observed was that the device driver came up and claimed that
the board was not there.  Just to verify that I hadn't done something
stupid, I went back to 8Mb and it worked, disabled the cache and it worked,
went back to 12mb with the cache still disabled and it didn't work.  This
is going to sound like a thermonuclear fly swatter, but what I did was to
put another machine on modem (and printer) duty and networked to it.  This
had two side benefits.  I was eligible to relax the security on ssbn since
people I don't know no longer had roaming privileges and their response
time improved considerably since they weren't competing for cycles with my
X development.  You might find that a "throw away" box is a viable
solution with some additional benefits.  It's a pleasure to be able to break
ssbn or take it down (gasp! to boot native DOS) and not get a lot of howling
from the dial up users.
-- 
Bill Kennedy  usenet      {att,cs.utexas.edu,pyramid!daver}!ssbn.wlk.com!bill
              internet    bill at ssbn.WLK.COM   or attmail!ssbn!bill