Re: [NTLK] Ethernet woes

On 9/24/09, Jeremy O'Brien wrote:

>So I've been experimenting with getting NCX to work on my MBP with my
>emate. I have a 3com 3c589C card that seems to be supported by the
>driver I have installed on the emate. I'm just having a weird issue. I'm
>using TCP/IP transport for NCX in the Dock application on the emate to
>connect to my mac. I have successfully gotten it to work twice out of
>about ten times, and I'm not sure what makes it work and what doesn't.
>The dongle I use to connect my pcmcia card to an ethernet cable has a
>light on it that indicates connectivity. I notice that when I try to
>initiate a connection on the emate, the light will blink on and then
>quickly turn off when it doesn't work, and it will blink and then light
>up and stay on when it does work. The first time I got it to work was
>immediately after a soft reboot, and it failed immediately after. I
>soft-rebooted again, and it did not work immediately, but took 4-5
>failed attempts before it decided to work again. I would really like to
>have a reliable method to get my notes off of this thing... The problem
>is that my only computer with a serial connection runs linux, and linux
>support isn't there for getting stuff off the newton. I use UnixNPI to
>install packages to it, and that works just fine. I'm just lost as to
>how I can get my notes/works docs off of it. Everytime I think I find a
>reliable solution, something goes wrong :(

Hi, Jeremy -

Your description mirrors almost exactly the difficulty I was having just
yesterday. I had an error on my MP2100 that for some reason wiped the
'directory' information off my 20MB flash card. I'm a bit confused as
to what exactly happened, but the end product was a working card that
the Newton saw as completely blank. Fortunately, all of my data was on
the internal store, and I only had packages to restore. I had a backup
of the card made thru NCX, so I went that route. I chose ethernet for
speed, but after the same kind of mess that you described, I elected to
go with serial. Started it up and went away for a couple of hours...

I am now ready to start troubleshooting this again, and I think I recall
having had the same problem previously. My theory is that there is some
sort of timing issue between NIE, Dock, and NCX that makes the
connection failure-prone. I vaguely recall that initiating the TCP/IP
connection (e.g. - with Courier) then launching the Dock and connecting
to NCX gave me better luck (although not perfect) when I was connecting
through ethernet more often a year or two ago. I haven't had a chance
yet to test it out, but I intend to do so in the next couple of days.

 - Don

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Received on Thu Sep 24 22:27:42 2009