Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!victoria!davisp
From: davisp@victoria.CWRU.EDU (Palmer Davis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.att
Subject: 6386/SVR 3.2.1: How to get to talk to StarLAN-10?
Summary: AT&T: The Wrong Choice
Message-ID: <919@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu>
Date: 29 Nov 89 01:44:04 GMT
Sender: news@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu
Reply-To: davisp@skybridge.scl.cwru.edu (Palmer Davis)
Organization: The Orbiting Mind-Control Lasers
Lines: 42

I've been playing telephone tag with the tech support hotline all week and
they haven't given me a straight answer on this... and this SHOULD be an
absolutely trivial question.

I recently purchased a 6386 from our university bookstore through a special
program they ran to get students connected to our new campus fiber-optic net.
Net Services set us all up with StarLan-10 cards and MS-DOS software to 
access the network.  I have since removed all my MS-DOS software and replaced
it with AT&T UNIX System V (3.2.1), but have no way to get UNIX to talk to my
StarLan-10 NAU card (and the rest of the network).

The answer I got from technical support is that I have to set some option
of the SYSADM command to tell it about my fiber card when installing some
package... but I didn't receive any UNIX add-on package with my NAU card and
THERE IS NO SYSADM command in SVR 3.2 for the 386!  None of the documentation
I received with my foundation set mentions StarLan or TCP/IP at all, except
one brief mention of an RFS option that needs to be set when using RFS with
StarLan... and *that* refers to a file in directory "/dev/net" that I don't
have.  (I don't have any such directory.)

Somehow I didn't get the impression that the technical support people I talked
to understood what it was I was trying to ask them... which disturbs me to no 
end as support was my reason for choosing AT&T instead of ESIX... a decision I 
have since come to very deeply regret after a month of isolation from our 
campus network.  I would *think* that AT&T would support their own card on
their own box under their own operating system...!

To reiterate my problem: I have the StarLan-10 NAU card, but *just* the bare 
hardware (and some diagnostic disk... but I tried feeding that to installpkg 
and it's definitely *not* a SysV add-on package...).  I need whatever device
driver support is required for it, as well as a TCP/IP protocol suite so that
I can communicate with our campus network (and the rest of the Internet).  If
I understand correctly, I *should* be able to download a TCP/IP suite from a
server on campus somewhere if I select a certain option when installing a
certain package from a disk... but I don't have that disk, and nobody at AT&T
will tell me how to get it!

-- Palmer Davis --
Palmer T. Davis                 | Internet: davisp@skybridge.scl.cwru.edu
Case Western Reserve University | UUCP: {att,sun,decvax}!cwjcc!skybridge!davisp
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