Re: Pocket Adaptor support?

[<markus@infoscape.com>]

Richard Gooch writes:
 > This touches on two issues. Firstly, actual booting via the parport
 > (be it PLIP or an EtherNet pocket adaptor). The second is bandwidth
 > issues. Can someone tell me what the bandwidth of one of these parport
 > EtherNet adaptors is? PLIP bandwidth is quite low: only 50 kBytes/sec
 > at best.

PLIP supports a variety of different transfer modes that depend on the 
type of cable that you use and on the type of printer port that your
computer has. I would expect it to do more than 50kB/s, but I have
never actually tried it myself. I don't think that any of those
parport ethernet adapters can achieve any significantly higher
transfer rates.

If you want to do a quick and dirty test, then download the PLIP
packet driver from ftp://ftp.crynwr.com/drivers/plip.zip and use it
with netboot. Judging from a superficial inspection of the source
code, I doubt that this packet driver knows about any of the more
advanced transfer modes; thus bandwidth is probably very limited.


Markus

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Markus Gutschke                         Internet: markus@infoscape.com
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Disclaimer: The above message represents my personal opinion; It does
            not constitute an offical statement by Infoscape!

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