Specialix cards (was: Welcome to comp.unix.sysv386)

[Jeff Crilly N6ZFX]

In article <1990Sep03.003401.13086 at virtech.uucp> cpcahil at virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
>Welcome to the comp.unix.sysv386 newsgroup.  This newsgroup (actually the

[blah blah blah....]

>9. What are good intelligent multi-port serial card solutions?
>
>	This is yet another religous issue.  The following cards are 
>	available for AT bus systems.  Note that the cards are listed
>	in alphabetical order and that this should not be taken as a
>	recommendation of any one card over the others.

>	Specialix
>		Specialix provides a series of serial port solutions.  I
>		have no experience/pricing info on these cards.
>


I have some experience with this product that I thought I'd share with 
the group.  

I bought a specialix si/32 (host card + 4 8 port terminal adaptors
for a total of 32 ports) last year (october 89).  The system I am
using is an Everex Step 25 (25mhz '386) running SCO Unix V.3.2.
First off I should say that I am not using these ports for general
unix logins.  They are used by a single program running on the 
machine that accepts data from one or more of the serial ports.
The program also writes data to the ports.  This ports are, however, 
attached to modems, so I can give a little insight on that area.
We were looking for a machine that could support 32 serial ports
at a price under $10k. We had condsidered Suns but the serial
io on those guys leaves a little to be desired.  Hence the 386
and the Specialix.  I won't go into details of our application 
here, but will try to convey as much information as possible 
about the card.  

First some initial observations.  There are two parts to the system.
A host card (which is half length) and 1 or more "terminal adapters" (TA).
Each terminal adapter supports eight ports with full modem control
on each port.  The TAs are daisy chained together by a mating plug
and socket on each side of each box.  Up to four terminal adapters
may be connected together providing 32 ports.  The specialix people
tell me that you can put two cards in the host which gives you
64 ports.  There are a couple mechanical problems that I noticed with 
the system.  First, the mating of the TAs is not very good.  It turns
out there are some tolerance problems and as a result the plugs and
sockets don't fully mate.  Specialix tries to solve the problem
by providing straps that screw onto the side of the TAs.  Unfortunately
the design of these uses self taping screws which tend to strip easily
and the design of the strap just doesn't provide a secure and tight
connection.  Second, a similar problem exists with the host adapter.
The back panel plate that the connector is on does not slide directly
into the AT case slot.  Likewise the screw hole is also off.  I had
to bend the back panel plate to make it fit.  The folks at specialix
told me that their supplier sent them the wrong connectors and this
was why the tolerances were wrong.  I believe they might be shipping
units that have these problems solved, but be aware of it....they
wouldn't replace mine with new ones.

Installation was not too rough.  However the first host adapter I received
was giving me all sorts of problems.  After replacing it everything 
worked fine.  For about six months the system had an intermittent problem:
Occasionally it would not pass data to the application from any serial 
ports. Rebooting the system fixed it.  Specialix support was disappointing
in solving the problem.  Seriously, they were convinced that the 
problem was not with their card or TAs.  Finally one day the
problem became repeatable. I swapped TAs and narrowed it down to a 
bad TA.  I took it back to Basic Time (my dealer) and they tested
it in house and gave me a new one immediately.  I have not installed
the new TA yet due to lack of time and other things but the system
has been working great since discovering that problem.

One thing you should know before buying is that the TAs serial ports 
are configured as DTE devices.  This means that if you going to
use terminals, then its no sweat hooking em up.  If you are going
to use modems (like me) then you need a *special* kind of null
modem (because DTR is straight through) which I had to get manufactured.

Software drivers: Initially I received version 1.02 with the card.
There were several bugs that existed in this version which I won't
go into because they are now shipping version 3.04 which seems to have
solved alot of problems.  The drivers support the select() system
call which is important to my application.  Specialix was also
*very* *very* helpful in providing information to allow me to retrieve
the status of DTR, DCD, and DSR from the card.  This was crucial
to my application.  One problem with the driver is that select()
on the SI driver does not behave exactly the same as if I was using
the one of the COM ports.  However I was able to work around
the problem.  Specialix told me that this was really a SCO problem
but I didn't understand why it works with the dumb serial card/SCO
driver and not the Specialix.  (The problem was that select() would
not unblock if the serial device had been opened when DCD was asserted).

They claim that the card works with MultiScreens (tm of SCO).  I haven't
tested it in that capacity.  As for throughput; they claim 38.4kbps.
It works up there but I haven't tried any load testing.  I should note
that there were some problems running at that speed with version 1.02 of
the driver so I dropped the speed down to 19.2kbps.  Version 3.04 may
fix this problem.  I can't imagine that it doesn't; though I haven't
been able to test it and 19.2 kbps is o.k. for my application.

The card was about $1800 for the 32 ports.  I think the breakdown
is $200 for the card and $400 for each 8 port TA.  The reason I
selected it was (1) I needed full modem control on all ports and
(2) the Specialix guys assured me that it would work with select,
while other manufactures told me that their product would not or
might not.  It is a pretty good product that I am sure will improve
over time.  I am pleased with it and to date have not seen another
product that offers the same capabilities for my application (other
than some SparcStation 1 [4/60] S-bus based stuff).

Jeff Crilly (N6ZFX)
AMIX Corporation  2345 Yale Street  Palo Alto, CA  94306
jeff at amix.com, {uunet,sun}!markets!jeff