Specialix Products

Technical Support have recently reviewed two products from Specialix.

The MTS is an Ethernet terminal server which allows connection of between 8 and 32 ports RS232 or RS422 ports via Ethernet to a TCP/IP server. Modules of 8 ports can be added to increase the connections from 8 to 32. An option also exists for each 8 port module to have a parallel port in place of one of the DB25/RJ45 ports. Printing can be simply configured using the "rcp" command available with UNIX/Xenix TCP/IP packages.

The RIO product is an intelligent I/O controller allowing connection of 128 ports to a single RIO MCA card (the card takes 64KB of the available 128KB of base memory used for addressing MCA cards). Each RTA (remote terminal adapter) provides 8 ports (RS422, RS232C with DB25 and RS232C with RJ45 are the connection options) which can be connected to the host card and/or other RIO RTAs. The distance between RTA units can be upto 75m using twisted pair cabling and 1Km using fibre-optics. The card and RTAs have been tested successfully using twisted pair connections on the following settings:

The values above are those usually attributed to the SI-PS/2 cards we currently sell. Please remember all the address space from C000 to CFFF is used by a RIO MCA card and only one MCA card can currently be installed in FTe/FTs servers.

Select the PS/2 compatible option during the SCO UNIX driver installation.

To configure the ports use the "config.rio" program, this will give you a diagrammatic representation of the RIO RTA topology as you configure it. Names are assigned to each RTA allowing locations to be easily identified. Configuration is dynamic with no power cycling required for implementation. Devices are addressed as ttyr001/ttyR001 using the 3 digits allows for 128 lines per card (on some systems it is possible to install more than one card). Transparent printing to AUX ports on terminals is also supported if required,

Tri-colour LEDs on the RTAs give the status of the various comms links between RTAs and the host card further enhancing activity monitoring and fault diagnosis. The establishment of communications links and any failures are routinely reported on the system console and in the file /usr/adm/messages.

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