[plug] [ot] Alpha ethernet

[Cameron Patrick]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 10:23:42PM +0800, Harry McNally wrote:
| On Mon, 8 Dec 2003 22:01:02 +0800 Cameron Patrick <cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au> wrote:
| 
| > G'day people,
| > 
| > I don't suppose anyone here knows whether a DEC Alpha will take a
| > standard cheapo PCI Realtek NIC?  I have an old Alphastation (from the
| > Computer Angels sale yesterday *wink*)
| 
| And a very good buy I'm told ;-) Praps you can loan it to Nick occasionally
| who I think had an eye on that machine, too. Or give him ssh access; that
| would be handy. Come to think of it, what about accounts for local ppl doing
| Alpha ports ?

ssh access sounds vaguely feasible... about the only thing is that it's
on my LAN at home.  While I trust everyone on the PLUG list (except
perhaps Adrian :-P) marginally further than I can throw them, I'd need
to think long and hard about firewalling that Alpha first.  (And fix any
accounts which still have the username as password(!))

Or perhaps I could look into porting User Mode Linux to the alpha...

Also, the SCSI hard drive in there is incredibly noisy - I can hear it
now despite it being trapped in a cupboard with the door shut - so it's
not being left on permanently for the moment.  A newer drive (and more
RAM) would also be nice but that would cost money, and I've already
spent enough money on that machine for the moment.

An occassional loan might also be on the cards once I've had a shot at
playing with it :-)

| In terms of a 10/100 NIC for Alphastation running Woody, I'm no help. Is
| Google unfriendly this evening ?

Ah, you've got me there, I admit I hadn't Googled extensively before
posting.  I'm seeing mixed results... people who have them working and
people who don't.  Sounds like they're the same endianness as a PC so
that shouldn't be a problem.

Further to this - Documentation/networking/rtl8139.txt in the kernel
source tree claims the Alpha is supported.  *smacks forehead*  Dunno why
that didn't come up on Google. :-/

Suck it and see, I suppose - I'll drop in to PLE tomorrow and if it
doesn't work, I'll have a spare cheapo NIC on my hands.  For $10 there's
not too much to lose :-)

Cameron.