Computone Intelliport Serial Board

[Royal Ontario Museum]

In article <774 at jack.UUCP> steve at jack.UUCP (Steven Harrison) writes:
>In article <1989Mar26.091015.1214 at gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> romwa at gpu.utcs.toronto.edu (Royal Ontario Museum) writes:
>>With reference to a posting last week about problems with
>>linking HDB uucp and "old" uucp Xenix, I think the problem is
>>due to a brain damaged Computone Intelliport card.  This
>>cluster controller works fine with standard dumb terminals on
>>it, but fails miserably with uucp and kermit file transfers
>>between the Xenix box and a PC.  Seems like it cannot handle
>>steady streams of data.
>>
>I do not know who you have talked to at Computone nor am I sure if you really
>believe what you are saying but let me say this.  We have been using their
>boards for about five years now on a number of different machines, and
>a variety of modems. This includes a 300 Hayes modem and most recently a
>Telebit Trailblazer.  By the way we have used a number of UUCp's including
>System 5.3 HDB and all have worked just fine!
>
>I would suggest that you look at your configurations in /atx/attype and verify
                                                         ^^^^^^^^^
Steve, I really am having problems with this board.  I can see
from the above file reference that you do not have their
latest products.  I, too, have successfully used their older
boards for the last 4 years.  Their new "Intelliport" cluster
controller is based on a NEC V50 cluster controller chip. It
is on a single board with four multiplexed high speed serial
connectors.  Up to four 16 port cluster boxes can be attached
as far away as 2000'.  (We are limiting our cable runs to a
couple hundred feet.)  This cabling scheme keeps our false
ceilings a bit tidier and the cabling costs down.

It seems to me they must have a polling or time slicing scheme
running that does not give a uucp port enough time to get
large chunks of data through.  That it failed with a simple PC
to Xenix kermit transfer also says there is something wrong.

When I called, they admitted the problem and were "working on
it".  In the long run, they'll fix it, I hope.

>
>>Also, I cannot get a standard Hayes 2400 modem to work
>>consistently on this board.  The modem correctly picks up the
>>line on dial in  but there is no carrier as the Computone board seems
>>not to be communicating with the modem.  Occasionally, after a
>>disable/enable sequence the modem will work correctly for one
>>call, then the line goes into outer space again, until some
>>fortuitous sequence of events such as a reboot or dis/enable
>>sets things right.
>>
>Let's face it Hayes modems are not the best modems in the world to use
>for bi-directional UUCP traffic.  I would suggest that you set your
>dialers scripts such that &D2 and &C0 are set for dialing out, and &D2 and &C1 are set for dialing in.  Make sure you reset the modem at the beginning
>of the dialer script also, so that you can be assured of some known
>state.

Looks like I learned the hard way.  Each time I cu to the
modem to work on the set up and then try to enable the line,
it doesn't come up.  All that it needed was a hardware reset.
>
>-----
>J. Steven Harrison
>Systems'n'Software

Mark T. Dornfeld
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queens Park
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
M5S 2C6

mark at utgpu!rom      - or -     romwa at utgpu