On Apr 2, 2014 4:40 AM, "Seth Morabito" <seth at loomcom.com> wrote:
After hunting for what seems like ages, I finally
acquired an AT&T PC
7300 today. In most ways it's fairly modest (40MB disk, 2 MB RAM), but
I was very excited to find that it does have the Ethernet expansion
card installed.
Ethernet or Starlan? They're completely unrelated cards, but commonly
confused, and the Starlan card is useless (IMHO). The Starlan card has an
Intel 82586 NIC chip, while the Ethernet has (IIRC) an AMD 7990.
There exists a really awful IP stack by Wollongong for the Ethernet card,
and no IP stack for the Starlan card.
I reset the root password and got into the system. It
has the TCP/IP
drivers loaded, and I'm able to do marvelous things like telnet and
ftp on my LAN. Remarkable!
Apparently you really do have the Ethernet card.
The software predates subnetting, so it decides what is on your local net
by whether the assigned IP address is class A, B, or C. Years ago I added a
"bozo-ARP" command to the Telebit NetBlazer router to "fix" that, by
having
the NetBlazer automatically proxy for any IP address in an ARP request but
not on the local subnet. The NetBlazer is now just as obsolete as the 7300.
Somewhere I should have an equivalent written to run as a daemon on BSD,
but I can't seem to find it at the moment.
Another problem is that the kernel doesn't have the select(1) system call,
so they fake it, in such a way that it only works on sockets, which was
enough to let them hack FTP and telnet to work in the most common cases,
but not a lot of other stuff. For instance, a program that does a select()
on both a socket and a tty will fail.
Eric