DEC's PCI card is the "DEFPA" and their EISA card is the "DEFEA". These are all supported by free Unixes and come in various CDDI/FDDI, DAS/SAS, and connector flavors according to the specific submodel. All cards which use fiber optics use 62.5/125 μm multimode. DEC also has a mezzanine PCI card called the "DEFPZ".
| Model | Connectors | Comments |
| DEFPA-AA | SAS, SC | apparently the same as the -AB, but not mentioned in the user's guide |
| DEFPA-AB | SAS, SC | |
| DEFPA-UB | SAS, CDDI | |
| DEFPA-DB | DAS, SC | |
| DEFPA-MB | DAS, CDDI |
| Model | Connectors | Comments |
| DEFEA-AA | SAS, MIC | |
| DEFEA-UA | SAS, CDDI | |
| DEFEA-DA | DAS, MIC | main card and secondary (requires two slots) |
| DEFEA-MA | DAS, CDDI |
3Com also made PCI and EISA FDDI cards. Their 3C797 is just a rebadged DEFPA. I also tried some of their 3c80x PCI FDDI cards and they stank, although I suspect it was a Windows driver problem. Those cards could barely put out 100K per second, making them slower than plain Ethernet! Your mileage may vary.
SysKonnect made PCI, EISA, and even ISA FDDI cards. They're still making the PCI cards. These are fairly widely supported across Linux and commercial Unixes and seem to be well-regarded, especially the high-performance 64-bit/66MHz PCI units.
| Model | Connectors | Comments |
| DEFTA-AA | SAS, ST | There are at least two varieties of -AA. One has the connectors widely spaced, and the other has the connectors very close together (looks like it might be built on a -DA circuit board, with one set of connections not installed). |
| DEFTA-UA | SAS, CDDI | Never seen one. |
| DEFTA-DA | DAS, ST | Never seen one. |
| DEFTA-FA | SAS, ST | Looks just like an -AA with widely-spaced connectors. Appears to be the most common type despite not being listed in the user's guide which I have. A Google lookup of the part numbers on the optical transmitter and receiver seems to indicate that this model uses 62.5/125 μm multimode, so I'm not sure how it differs from an -AA at all. |
| DEFZA-AA | SAS, ST | Can't identify the optical transmitter and receiver without radically disassembling the unit, so I don't know what kind of fiber it takes. |
All DEFTA models which use fiber optics use 62.5/125 μm multimode.
The Indigo2 and Challenge M (AFAIK the same machine with or without a graphics head and with a different name on the front) have GIO64 slots. SGI made FDDI cards for these slots. They seem to show up on Ebay reasonably often, for reasonable prices. These are regarded as rocking cards, with reported speeds on the order of six megabytes per second.
The Onyx, Challenge L, and Challenge XL have VME slots. I've seen FDDI cards for these on Ebay. They seem to be dual FDDI interfaces, in fact. Older SGI Power machines used VME as well. I don't know whether these FDDI boards are supported in those.
Jochen Kunz reports: I have a SGI Personal Iris 4D35 with a VME FDDI card. I got the machine that way, so I think this config is supported by SGI / IRIX. This SGI VME FDDI card is a OEM version of the Interphase Peregrine 4211. SGI made some changes (read bugfixes) to the hardware and wrote a new firmware to get more throughput out if this thing. A stock 4211 will not work with IRIX, you need the SGI version.
Dave McGuire reports: The Interphase 4211 (VME) and 5211 (VME64) "Peregrine" boards are 6U VME FDDI interfaces. The 4211 is commonly used in a 6U-9U adapter frame in VME SGI systems, but a better way to get FDDI in a Ebus/VMEbus SGI is to use a mezzanine FDDI controller (built by SGI) that plugs onto an IO4 board. These are DAS with SC connectors. The 4211 is also used in the Cray YMP-EL family's VME I/O subsystem, and the 5211 is used in the J90 family's VME64 I/O subsystem...but the Unicos driver can talk to a 4211 as well.
Several vendors, including Sun, have made SBus FDDI boards. Stay away from Cisco, they've dropped support for these boards to the extent that you can't even get drivers for them anymore. Many SBus FDDI boards are reported to have poor performance for one reason or another. Linux may recently have added support for some of these boards, which would make it the only free Unix to have support.
Sun VME board, the FDDI/DX, option 461, part number 501-1276, is (officially) supported in the Sun 3/150, 3/180, 3/260, 3/280, 3/460, 3/470, 3/480, 4/110, 4/150, 4/260, 4/280, 4/330, 4/350, 4/390, 4/470, 4/490, 4/630, 4/670, and 4/690. Up to two were supported (fddi0, fddi1) in one machine if there were slots available. In the 3/1xx, CPU revisions 501-1163-09, 501-1164-09, or 501-1208-xx or later were required. The 4/330 requires power supply 300-1072. Using this board for diskless booting required ROM 3.0 or later. This board was only supported from SunOS 4.0.3 to Solaris 2.1. I don't know whether support was bundled in the OS or whether an additional package was required.
Jochen Kunz reports: There are SunOS 4.x m68k and SPARC drivers for the Interphase Peregrine 4211 and 5211. I saw them somewhere when I looked for infos about the SGI 4211 derivate.
| SK-5221 | SAS, CDDI |
| SK-5241 | SAS, MIC |
| SK-5251 | DAS, CDDI |
| SK-5261 | DAS, SC(?) |
IBM made an FDDI board, FRU 93F0377, for MCA-based RS/6000s. It uses a MIC connector and requires a secondary board (connected via a ribbon cable) and a second slot in the DAS configuration. They're vastly cheaper than the rare Fast Ethernet MCA boards, which normally go for several hundred dollars.
Almost all 700 workstations and 800 servers up to the models with PA8200 chips have EISA slots. For these systems there were EISA boards both from HP and from Interphase available. The HP-board (A3659A) was apparently only supported up to HP-UX 10.20. (I have two of these, SAS MIC boards P/N B5502-66002. There was also P/N B5502-66001, a DAS MIC board. Unlike most EISA boards, HP took advantage of the additional height available in their chassis and just barely managed to squeeze a second MIC connector in -- it's very visible in the layout of my SAS boards.) (Drivers should be on the "Applications CD"). The Interphase boards should have come along with their own drivers, though possibly also only supported up to HP-UX 10.20. Available were boards with SAS and DAS FDDI connectors (WA-C321T-UX and WA-C326T-UX), with SAS and DAS CDDI connectors (WA-C323T-UX and WA-C328T-UX) and with an option of both CDDI and MIC connectors (4811).
The HP 9000/735 had an optional FDDI slider board replacement for the Ethernet one. It attaches directly to the main bus and uses a AMD Formac+ chipset with a MIC connector.
For systems with an EISA-formfactor GSC-slot there was an original HP GSC expansion card (A3722A and A3723A) with possibly higher performance than the EISA ones. Drivers were supplied at least until HP-UX 11.00.
For several 800 servers there existed both SAS and DAS HP-PB FDDI cards (J2157A), which are said to have a far better performance than their 10/100 Ethernet counterparts. These come as double-height HP-PB cards. (I have one of these as well, P/N 28670-60001, for the 807S and 817S. There seem to be slight variations in the part numbers of the boards for different models in the 800 family; whether these are actually significant I don't know.)
Finally, there are also PCI FDDI cards for these newer machines with the PCI bus.
I believe that I've seen Cisco EISA FDDI boards for HP servers on Ebay.
You can get some information about some of these boards on openpa.net and on partsurfer.hp.com if you can find a breakdown for your model.
All text and pictures copyright (c) 2003 James Birdsall.