Hello fellow LUGers, Well, I have not yet had any success in acquiring a working laptop on which I can run the DiamondCraft DSLAM control software and the evil OS it is layered upon. I've got Dante's Toshiba laptop, but I can't get it to work at all (dead screen IIRC); I've got another laptop with WinNT4.0 on it which I've bought from someone in LA, but there is no way to load DiamondCraft or any other software on it because the CD-ROM is broken and it won't recognize any USB sticks either.
So I am back to asking the group if anyone can sell me a *working* laptop that would meet the following requirements for running the darned DSLAM management software: 1. It needs to have either WinNT4.0 or Win2k already installed on it. I don't see how I could install either OS myself: I doubt that one can still buy a legal copy of something that old, and I have no slightest idea where one would find a liberated copy or how to go about installing it. (The last Weendoze version I have ever installed on a machine myself was Win3.1, which ran on top of DOS.) 2. It needs to have a serial port. The whole point of the exercise is to run a piece of SW that talks to a piece of specialized HW (the out-of-band management port of a DSLAM) over RS-232 serial. The horrible proprietary SW in question (DiamondCraft) is widely reported (in the respective circles) to be extremely finicky and capricious, so I don't want to take the chances of trying to run it with a USB-to-serial converter. 3. It needs to have *some* working mechanism whereby one can load new SW into machine, i.e., either CD-ROM *or* USB *or* Ethernet needs to be working. If anyone here can sell me a laptop that meets all 3 of the requirements listed above, I would be willing to pay quite generously: I am now losing the last remaining bits of my sanity trying to get the @#$%^&* DSLAM up and running. I've got the DSLAM powered up with -48 VDC, I have finally obtained a set of cards with matching firmware versions, but the only way to configure this Creature from Hell is to connect to its serial port and to speak some horrendous proprietary binary protocol over it; the latter protocol seems to consist of a half-assed implementation of PPP which has only ever been tested and made to work with the WinNT implementation on the other end, and then SNMP running over that, err, make that a proprietary non-standard SNMP-like operating on a proprietary undocumented MIB, i.e., nothing other than their stinking Weendoze app (which is of course obsolete past the end of all support) can ever talk to it. I really don't think that something like wine would cut it because WinNT's implementation of serial PPP also has to be in the equation. TIA, MS _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list LinuxUsers@socallinux.org http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
