Under OpenVMS only, in addition to the console ports OPA0 and TTA0, Avanti supports up to 25 additional serial ports via five virtual 5-port serial cards. The serial cards are modified emulations of the Digiboard PC/8 ISA-based serial card that was supported by older AlphaServers.
Note:The Digiboard serial ports are not recognized by Tru64 UNIX and may cause unpredictable behavior if defined.
The serial cards are not supported by the Avanti configuration utility. They must be manually added to the configuration file. The following sample code demonstrates adding a card. A complete configuration file appears at the end of this chapter.
isa0 = digiboard
{ serial0 = i16550
{ tn = telnet
{ port = 9010;
action = """C:\Program Files\Common Files\MigrationSpecialties Shared\putty.exe"" telnet://127.0.0.1:9010";
}
}
serial1 = i16550
{ phys = ext_serial
{ device = "\\.\COM1";
}
}
serial2 = i16550
{ phys = ext_serial
{ device = "\\.\COM2";
}
}
serial3 = i16550
{ phys = ext_serial
{ device = "\\.\COM30";
}
}
serial4 = i16550
{ phys = ext_serial
{ device = "\\.\COM31";
}
}
}
This example defines an emulated Digiboard card containing five serial ports; TXA0 - TXA4. TXA0 is a telnet port. TXA1 – TXA4 are assigned to physical COM ports 1, 2, 30 and 31.
Up to five serial ports can be defined on each card, running from serial0 thru serial4. Up to five Digiboard cards can be defined, running from isa0 thru isa4, for a total of 25 additional serial ports. However, isa2, isa3, and isa4 conflict with pci13, pci12, and pci11 respectively. That means that isa2 can only be used if pci13 is not used, etc. This limits the number of Digiboard cards to four for most systems (where one disk controller and one NIC are required).
The sections within “serial = i16550 { … }” follow the same rules as the regular serial ports, so in addition to defining them as telnet server ports, they can also be assigned to physical serial ports (COMn) on the host server.
The emulated Digiboard PC/8 is supported by the VMS SYS$YSDRIVER. As on a real Alpha system, the card is not recognized by VMS by default. It requires additional set up steps to make it work.
