Huh. Now that's really really interesting.
So when I bought the 3B2/400 from the guy in Chicago, he also sold me a StarLAN MAU box (haven't tested that yet) and I had bought some PC cards for the Intel side that did StarLAN (actual AT&T cards). Those are only marketed as StarLAN cards, and nothing says anything about using them in another way. I'd also bought a couple of StarLAN AUIs, but again they are AT&T manufacture and just say they're for StarLAN on them. The goal was eventually to have a bit of StarLAN in the museum, just because.
While doing research on it, we'd noticed that the cabling seemed very similar to ethernet, at least with the 4 pair and the RJ45. But we presumed that there would be some sort of hardware difference, and that while you might be able to use the same cables, it seemed unlikely it would just be a software or configurable switch somewhere.
The fun part was in order to boot the 3B2/400 the first time, we pulled basically all of the cards out so we could see the smoke if it happened. Not only did smoke not happen, but the machine booted. And watching the system messages, it got to a point where it said it no longer had a StarLAN card, so it was removing all of its drivers from the kernel (ah, fully dynamic kernel, so much fun).
We were like "wait, we didn't pull out a StarLAN card!" I asked the guy in Chicago if he remembered having one, and he said he thought he did but hadn't seen it lately. He promised if he found it to send it along. Ironically of course, we DID remove an NI card from the machine.
Given what you've said, I'd presume the secret lies in the starlanmgmt configuration somewhere. If it can turn it on, I'd hope it can turn it off and that you don't need a completely different program to do that. I don't remember a separate program for the IP side of things that would "turn on" the IP stack, but as I've indicated you just taught me that NIs may be capable of way more than I realized, and I may not need to look for a separate "StarLAN" network card for the 3B2s.
Sorry I'm not able to directly help with the problem, but thanks for teaching me something along the way. :)
- Mowgli On Tuesday, July 30, 2024 at 11:25:05 PM EDT, Dave McGuire via 3b2info 3b2info@lssmuseum.org wrote:
So for my first use of this list, at least, I would like to ask for a bit of assistance configuring an NI card.
We at LSSM have been working on building an exhibit around a 3B2/500. After dealing with some hardware issues, I installed an NI card, which passed all diagnostics and was reflected in the prtconf output. But then, while digging through the starlanmgmt program, I inadvertently apparently activated StarLAN, which changed the NI device to a NAU device. Now, when I try to configure IP, the kernel panics.
I feel really dumb. ;)
It looks to me that the same board (CM195A) can be either an NI for Ethernet or a NAU for StarLAN-10. The output of prtconf now shows the board in that slot as an NAU.
Can anyone tell me how to switch it back to NI mode, so that I may get it running on our network?
Thanks, -Dave