Hostess multiport serial card experience

[John Romkey]

There've been a few questions lately about multiport serial cards, so I
thought I'd share my experience with the Comtrol Hostess 8 port card.

This card is available with 4 or 8 ports. It's a dumb card, with no
local processor, and it occupies a half length board (the 8 port card
has a daughterboard on top with the second group of 4 ports).

The board has two thick cables coming out the back that connect to a
box with the serial connectors. The default is female DB25's. I
believe that DB9's and modular jacks are also available, and there are
several other options than RS232. If you're wondering about those, you
better call up Comtrol and ask them.

You can jumper the ports for a variety of interrupts and base I/O
addresses.

It comes with a pretty good manual, a DOS disk with a test program and
a loopback connector. Xenix has built-in support for it. Varied
support for other operating systems exists; ask Comtrol about it if
you're wondering.

After I rejumpered the card for the base address Xenix wanted (which I
found out through both the Xenix "mkdev serial" command and the
Hostess documentation), I installed the card as "COM2" with no
problems. My first test was to boot Xenix, and it came up and said
COM2 was a Hostess board with 8 ports. Great. I ran the DOS test under
DOS and it worked fine.

So far, I've only run it with one terminal hooked up to it -
eventually it will have a couple of 9600 baud modems and several other
terminals hanging off it, too. So I haven't managed to stress-test the
card very much yet, but it's performed quite well so far. If I have
any problems once I start loading it with a couple of other devices,
I'll send another note in to the list.

Finally, the ports are all configured as DTE, and you can't change
this. It's a bit of a pain for me; I have to rebuild my cables for the
terminals that are being hooked up to it - my old 1 port COM2 was set
up as DCE. Also, each port does support the modem control lines,
although I haven't tested them well yet - I have seen them go on with
a breakout box, though, but the terminals aren't paying any attention
to them.

The 8 port Hostess board lists for $695 from
	Comtrol Corporation
	NW 4001
	PO Box 66117
	St. Paul, MN 55166-0001
	612 631-7654
	800 333-1033

I have no association with Comtrol. I'd feel uncomfortable calling
this a recommendation as I haven't managed to test the Hostess card
under any heavy load yet, and I'm kind of paranoid about it - I really
expected something to go seriously wrong when I added an 8 port card,
and so far I've had exactly 0 problems, so I keep expecting one to
come up. So please treat this as merely a report of my experiences
with the board, and use it for informational purposes to draw your own
conclusions.
-- 
			- john romkey
romkey at asylum.uucp	romkey at xx.lcs.mit.edu	romkey at asylum.sf.ca.us
Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground
Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.