Serial Boards

[Doug Urner]

I'm trying to select a multi-port serial card for my '386 machine.
One of the board's major responsibilities will be to handle uucp
trafic through a high speed modem I am assuming that it will have
to be a "smart" board.

The OS is Interactive's 386/ix.

I have more or less narrowed my search to these three boards, but I
am open to other ideas.

    Anvil "Stallion" 8 port

        They claim to have implemented the tty driver on the board
	so that all serial i/o can be off loaded to the board.  This
	might be great but it also makes me a little nervous about
	the amount of finger pointing that could get involved with
	keeping the drivers in sync.  I also assume that I will have
	to keep two drivers around if I want any other serial boards
	on the system.

    Arnet "Smartport" 8 port

	This one did real well in "Infoworld's" benchmarks.  They also
	offer a "lifetime" (of the machine (or company, whichever comes
	first :-)) warranty.  Interactive supports this board.

    Dastra "MCIO/16" 8 port

	 This one also claims to have UNIX/XENIX specific support,
	 but I haven't been able to get much information about what
	 exactly it is that they do to support UNIX...

All of the benchmark reports that I have found in trade rags only report
on one of the above, so they are hard to compare.

I would appreciate any information that you care to share about these
boards.

Thanks in advance,

Doug Urner  uunet!wobble!dlu  206/676-5759