Network Cards

[Raj Mathur <raju@xxxxxxx>]

Buy any NE2000 clone, it should work.  Try to get a card with jumpers
so that you don't have to fool around with MS-DUH based utilities to
configure non-PCI, unjumpered cards.

As for the PC's, you can use any ISA card under MS-DUH.  Get the
packet driver for the card you have and use NCSA Telnet, one of the
finest pieces of software for MS-DUH, to login to Linux.  Packet
drivers for popular cards are available at wuarchive.wustl.edu among
other places.

Another possibility is to get a proper (bidirectional) parallel cable
and use PLIP to hook up your computers using the parallel ports.  PLIP
packet drivers for MS-DUH are also available at the same place.

Finally, I feel that coax cable sucks for any reasonably-sized
network.  However, if you're only doing this for 3 machines at home,
it's definitely a cheaper and workable solution.

I don't know of any free Unixen for 286's except Minix.  Xenix is a
commercial product.

Regards,

- -- Raju

>>>>> "Mani" == MANI SRIDHAR <msridhar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

    Mani> Dear Friends I have posted this question a couple of times
    Mani> on the list - rest assured i got replies. I;m not posting
    Mani> the same question again. I have been planning to somehow
    Mani> salvage an old 286 at home ( and theres an 8088 too ) and
    Mani> use it with linux - at least as a dumb terminal. I did do my
    Mani> homework rgarding network cards / ethernet , mainly by
    Mani> reading ethernet howto. But i still have some doubts.  My
    Mani> idea is to buy a PCI card for the Pentium machine that runs
    Mani> Linux. I went to a lot of shops in Madras ( my fellow
    Mani> chennai linuxers, i;'m talking about Ritchie Street ). They
    Mani> don't seem to have stocks of the D-Link network card, which
    Mani> I remember Atul telling somebody on the list, was a
    Mani> no-problem card as far as linux was concerned. There were
    Mani> other cards - Compex, Genius and all of them, the shop
    Mani> keepers claimed, were NE2000 clones. Now, can somebody
    Mani> briefly tell me how linux comes to know about these cards
    Mani> when you put them in ? i guess the PCI cards are
    Mani> autodetected, right ?  now to the 286. this machine has no
    Mani> harddisk and all i have is a dos boot floppy. le us say i do
    Mani> get an ISA card. how do i go about getting to use it ? None
    Mani> of the ISA cards i saw at the shops had any disks with the,m
    Mani> - and even when they did have them, they were merely
    Mani> installation disks for Windoze.  i'd really appreciate it if
    Mani> somebody could take the time to answer. As Atul says, I'm
    Mani> willing to experiment on my own a bit, but i need to know
    Mani> the ground rules first.  one more thing - i have a lot of
    Mani> coax cable at home - so wouldn't i be better of if i tried
    Mani> BNC with 10Base2 ?  and yet another thing - rather than use
    Mani> my 286 as a plain vanilla dumb terminal, is there somewhere
    Mani> i can get Xenix or something for the 286 so that i can give
    Mani> it an IP address and play around with routing ? I did search
    Mani> many engines for links on Xenix, but all drew a blank.
    Mani> Thanks in Advance Mani Sridhar

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