PCI-X Multiport Serial cards.

[C. Stephen Gunn]

Jamie Bowden (ragnar at sysabend.org) likely uttered:

> Does anyone have any experience with PCI-X multiport serial cards under
> FreeBSD (4 or 5, either is fine)?  I've got a 1u Dell machine that in 3
> weeks will lose it's current role in life, and I'd like to use it as a
> console server for a bunch of headless SGI and Sun boxes.  Its only
> expansion slot is PCI-X.  If anyone can recommend a known working card
> with at least 8 ports, I'd appreciate it.

Jamie --

First I think that PCI-X is just 133Mhz by 64-bit PCI.  You should be
bacward compatible.  Regular PCI is perfect for nearly anything you
might want to do.  And this machine clearly has the muscle to be one
heck of a nice conserver.

You might check out the PCI boards from Cyclades.  I've used both
the Cyclom-Y and Cyclom-Z board successfully under FreeBSD.  I did
have some trouble with Cyclom-Y under 4.X and reverted to 2.2.8
to run it (It was 3 years ago so I can't be sure).

You might also look into the 1-U rackmount products from Lantronix
or Cyclades.  A private Ethernet segment is nearly as good as
a custom interconnect to the server.

KS Braunsdorf's variant of conserver we run at work knows how
to talk directly to a tcp/ip destination, you just spell the
serial device differently in conserver.cf.  I'm not sure about
the ports, or comserver.com variants of conserver, but it wouldn't
surprise me if they supported it too.

The machine you have could easily handle 2-3 Muxes, so you
have plenty of room to grow.  Plus you can easily drop a second
machine on the black network and not be dead if the conserver
has a hardware issue, either. :)

 - Steve