[338] in Resnet-Forum
re: Re: what to offer
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Technical Services)
Wed Aug 31 11:50:00 1994
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 1994 11:13:47 -0400
Reply-To: Mark.I.Berman@williams.edu
From: Mark.I.Berman@williams.edu (Technical Services)
To: resnet-forum@MIT.EDU
X-Vms-To: IN%"resnet-forum@MIT.EDU"
>******* Quoted message:
> From: SMTP%"DESCHAPE@opus.oca.udayton.edu" 31-AUG-1994 10:13:19.36
> To: Rob Thirlby <R.Thirlby@lut.ac.uk>
> CC:
> Subj: Re: what to offer
>
> >
> > We are terrified of the work involved in fitting ethernet boards to a random
> > collection of grotty pcs made by every known manufacturer. how do others
> > cope with this? we are also concerned about the effort involved in software
> > support of PCs which are networked.
>
> We encourage students to purchase external (parallel port or scsi
> port) ethernet adapters. They are much easier to install/configure.
> We also require the students to install and configure whatever
> adapter they purchase. We have located an external ethernet adapter
> for PC compat. that sells for about $140 which makes it feasible, and
> reasonably competitive with the better internal boards. We also
> publish the fact that we support only two types of internal boards,
> and if a student purchases one of these boards we can provide drivers
> and software compatible with the boards, and will make a best effort
> at helping with problems. All in all, it's the student's
> responsibility to install and configure, while we we make a best
> effort to suppport. Since we are just beginning this venture, I
> can't yet say how it will work out.... we are crossing our collective
> fingers.
The main problems with external adaptors are, one: that they are nearly twice
the price of real NIC cards and, two: that their performance is quite a bit
worse.
We sell 3COM 3C509 adaptors for PCs and Asante adaptors for Macs. We make the
policy statement that those are the adaptors that we support and any
connections to the network with anything else is unsupported and liable to
disconnection without notice if any problems are caused by someone's oddball
el-cheapo adaptor card. We do also support some external adaptors (parallel,
SCSI, PCMCIA) for notebooks and computers that don't support the standard
adaptor cards.
- Mark
--
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Mark Berman Mark.Berman@Williams.EDU
Director, Technical Services
Williams College, Ctr. for Computing
Williamstown, MA. USA 01267 (413) 597-2092
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