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From: shull@scrolls.wharton.upenn.edu (Christopher E. Shull)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Ethernet board for Apollo3000 Actually a 3Com503 Board?
Message-ID: <15362@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 11 Oct 89 12:50:11 GMT
References: <4548@ginosko.samsung.com>
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: shull@scrolls.wharton.upenn.edu (Christopher E. Shull)
Followup-To: comp.sys.apollo
Organization: Decision Sciences Dept, Wharton School, U of Pennsylvania
Lines: 32

In article <4548@ginosko.samsung.com> warren@samsung.com (Warren Lavallee) writes:
[...]
>   We have an Apollo 3000 which is a 68020 box based on an AT bus [just
>like a PC]. Our machine has a token ring board which is of no use to
>us. Apollo offers another board that supports tcp/ip. My boss being
>notably tight-fisted balks at spending $700 for a board. On the other I
>suspect that the Apollo board is merely a 3COM503 Ethernet II. It would
>be nice to verify that.
[...]

The only problems are:

   1)  there is a special chip that Apollo adds to the 3COM503 board
       that lets it figure out its unique 48-bit Ethernet hardware
       address (based on the Apollo's node id), and, 

   2)  the original Apollo DN3000's didn't understand anything but
       token ring boards, and there is a boot PROM (or something) on
       the motherboard that needs to be replaced for them to accept
       an Ethernet board as its primary network.

Good luck!

-Chris

Christopher E. Shull                    shull@scrolls.wharton.upenn.edu
Decision Sciences Department            shull@wharton.upenn.edu
The Wharton School                      University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA  19104-6366            215/898-5930
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"Damn the torpedoes!  Full speed ahead!"  Admiral Farragut, USN, 1801-1870
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