[time-nuts] NI GPIB cards

[Dr. David Kirkby]

Didier Juges wrote:
> Other than that, in my experience, NI products have been remarkably
> compatible in the last 10 years, from a 30,000 feet level (plug pretty much
> anything into anything and it will work with any NI software, even though
> performance will vary and you may need new drivers). Exceptions are things
> like the bus snooping mode (forgot the name) which is only supported on the
> internal, bus type adapters (not USB unfortunately).
>   

I can give you another annoying exception. The PCI card NI makes will 
fit in a Sun SPARC (or UltraSPARC) based workstation, and works fine up 
to versions 9 of Solaris. Then, with version 10 of Solaris, there is a 
problem. The reason is that NI GPIB cards have always used the driver 
name "ib" on Solaris. Since the first release of Solaris 10, Sun decided 
to create a driver called "ib" for InfiniBand - obviously unaware 
National Instruments had been using that driver name. Hence if you try 
to install an NI GPIB card in a Sun running Solaris 10, you are likely 
to get a problem.

If you don't need InfiniBand. support, then the solution is to remove 
the InfiniBand driver and any packages which depend on it, in the 
correct order, which the following line does.

# pkgrm SUNWudapltr SUNWudapltu SUNWtavor SUNWrpcib SUNWipoib SUNWib

I managed to get Sun talking to National Instruments about this, but I 
note in the latest release of Solaris 10, the "ib" driver is still 
present. I also note that NI have not produced a driver which they claim 
works in Solaris 10. There's more info in this thread, which I have just 
updated the first time in a couple of years, to reflect my understanding 
of it now.

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=140&thread.id=15109

BTW, National Instruments sbus cards (fit older Suns) are cheap on eBay 
and so are the old sbus based Suns. But NI want a small fortune for 
Solaris drivers (399 UK pounds, which is about 800 US Solaris). But a 
cheap SPARC 20, sbus card, drivers (if you have them lying around) and 
Solaris 9 makes a pretty cheap and reliable system for GPIB. A 
SPARCstation 20 is pretty compact and works fine without a keyboard or 
moitor (use serial line to set it up, then ethernet afterwards).