Problems with sr driver and Wanic 400

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John L" <johnl at iecc.com>
To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com>
Cc: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 12, 2006 7:26 PM
Subject: Re: Problems with sr driver and Wanic 400


> > What I found works is freebsd 4.x, and a Pentium 2 350-400Mhz
> > this was using risecom n/2 cards.
> >
> > FreeBSD 6.1 doesen't work at any speed in this combo, it loses
> > packets.
>
> Phoo.  Does the pf or ipfw/altq stuff work on 4.x?

Yes, but I don't know if it has all the features you want.

> I'm currently runing
> an ISA n/2 in an old BSD/OS box which works fine except that it can't do
> priority queueing, and I have some voip phones that would benefit.
>
> > With Cisco 1601's selling on the used market for $25 or so, there's
> > little interest among the developers in fixing this.  Also the wanic 4xx
> > is no longer in production, another disincentive.
>
> Hmmn.  I think I have a Wanic 500 around that I bought on ebay.  Any
> support for those?

I've got a driver for this card that I was sent by Imagestream, they got it
from one of their developer/customers.  It's for something like FreeBSD 4.9
or 4.3, I can't remember which.  It will not compile unmodified on FreeBSD
4.11
Supposedly the programming docs for the chipset used on the WanIC 500 are
only available under NDA, so without clear direction from Imagestream
the driver would probably not be able to be distributed publically.  I never
signed an NDA, though.

The best bet for current support for these cards is to use Linux, you will
get plenty of support from Imagestream, then.

Unfortunately this is a market where the few manufacturers of synchronous
serial port chipsets - Hitachi, etc. - only have a handful of router vendors
(like Cisco, etc.) that regularly buy these chipsets.  The router vendors
are
faced with a shrinking market for these chips since more people are going to
DSL and such rather than T1s and they don't want to see an upstart
competitor
take away business, so all of them are pressuring the chipset manufacturers
to
be very sparing on providing documentation to anyone else.

Ted

  Or should I just make my BSD box ether to ether and
> sit a Cisco on top of it?
>
> Tnx.
>
> R's,
> John
>