BeOS Ramblings

My vastly more identifiable 10mbit DEC Tulip network card arrived today, a Cogent EM960P released shortly before they were bought by Adaptec. Adaptec themselves have been bought out and that firm sold on a number of times - but they still provide the drivers (for Windows NT on multiple architectures, SCO UnixWare, Netware and similar - but not MacOS) and the brochure on their website.  And - it works! It actually works, although I'm still SOL for MacOS

 As I've mentioned before, I've another BeOS R5 machine on the go - and this one has working WiFi. Four families of cards have drivers - Intersil Prism PCI/PCMCIA/USB, e.g. the ORiNOCO 11mbit cards, Ralink RT2500 54mbit cards, Intel 2100 11mbit cards and Intel 2200 54mbit cards. I have an ORiNOCO PCMCIA for various retro gear, and a mini PCI 2200 in the R5 laptop. Windows 98SE does not support this card - just too new - so I use the ORiNOCO with Odyssey to connect from it  I'm not going to expose my normal cable connection to an open WiFi connection, but I'm also getting rather annoyed having to use tethering on my mobile. So I dug up my old router, and have configured it as such, to allow for antique drivers: 2.4Ghz network, fixed channel, B/G mode, low power (it will always be very near to me), WEP 128bit, client isolation and MAC address filtering, and a 20mbits speed restriction. Admin username and password are both changed to not be the default for the router vendo

 So, it seems my 'working' NIC has a very odd problem - it can't upload packets of more than ~200 bytes. This let FTP downloading work fine - tiny requests would go fine, and it can download whatever it wants it seems. Pinging it from another machine gets replies up to 200 byte pings, but not 201. Pinging out is reliable up to 187 bytes but reduces in reliability beyond that til it's basically unusable at 200. The NIC was cheap, so I can just write it off and buy a 20140 which I know works properly on R5 for another ~€25; or I can poke around and see if I can find a reason for this happening. It'd be handy if it had a MacOS driver to see if the same issue happens there, indicating a dead card. I can probably find a PC with 5v compatible PCI slots and test under Linux which still has drivers either.

22 days after ordering - the wonders of slow shipping since the huge reduction in passenger flights between Ireland the USA - I am now the owner of 2x64MB sticks of unknown manufacturer, reconditioned (well, they're nice and clean at least) EDO RAM. (As an aside - one of the two sticks I took out was NEC memory, made in Ireland - like a lot of the components on this machine which dates from when our IT industry was manufacturing rather than engineering based. The actual computer was also built here, as was the 3Com network card I tried ) This brings the 5400 up to its maximum 136MB RAM - there is 8MB on board, which I sincerely hope nobody ever attempted to use the machine with, as it is not particularly pleasant even with 32MB. BeOS is now actually usable on it - previously if I had BeShare and/or Vision open, I had to get slightly worried about having the FTP daemon running or else I'd be out of RAM. 

Answer: You don't. Apologies for the retro-nerd-clickbait. R5 PPC only has cvs, and a very old version at that. R5 Intel has newer cvs, and also has SVN, but a very old version that can't talk https:// SVN; only SSH But I have to - so a workaround from hell has been bodged together. I have a Synology NAS to work as a Plex server and document/file dump. Its a full Linux/x86_64 system with regular updates; and one of its packages is a git server. I don't need the server, but this installs the command line git executable. It also has an FTP server built in, which can be turned on with one checkbox. So, my git checkout is stored on the NAS, and I download/upload changes to it using NetPenguin - Be's command line ftp is awful - and then telnet to the NAS to push/pull. I would SSH, but the newest SSH client built for BeOS PPC is 1.2.26 of the old official client, supporting protocol 1.5, which my NAS wisely does not accept! This is tortuously slow for large repos, of course,

My Digital 21140-AE network card, manufacturer unknown (MAC address resolves to ANI Communications Inc, who I've never heard of - nor really has Google) and date coded to mid 1997 across the components, arrived today. The combo of chipset and transceiver plus the device sub-IDs match a DLink DFE500TX though. It works out of the box in BeOS R5.03, albeit DHCP either seems sluggish or non-existent - not to worry, as it will only ever be used in one place.  It does not work out of the box with MacOS 8.6 - I've downloaded a few random drivers for SMC and AsanteFast cards that apparently share this chipset so we'll see if that can be made work. As I've nuked the MacOS install, I was pleasently surprised to find that you can still download Stuffit Expander 7 from Smith Micro directly, even if the entire product line is now EOL.