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Experiences Programming on Cyclades Term Servers?

Posted by Cliff on from the looking-before-making-that-long-leap dept.

Sunda666 writes "I just got my hands on the Cyclades TS800, which is a terminal server with 8 high-performance serial ports, and 1 fast ethernet port that happens to run MontaVista's Hard Hat Linux. This thing has a small RAM (16Mb) some SSD (8MB), and a PPC@48MHz processor. We plan to develop apps (mostly serial-to-eth gateway software, but anything goes) for it, and I'd like to have some feedback from the Slashdot crowd of sucess/failure histories, hints and stuff. So far I'm loving the little blue thing (embedded webserver, ssh, nfs, and RAS software - almost all open source!) - sweet." Sounds like a sharp little machine. How we do these things perform in production?

4 comments

  1. Good stuff by itwerx · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've never programmed Cyclades boxes but I've used them off and on over the years as terminal and print servers and I can say they're well nigh indestructible!
    The company's been around forever and their product quality (and tech support) has always been excellent.
    Their website always has useful stuff too.

  2. Just got a couple by Tobert42 · · Score: 1

    I just got a TS1000 and a TS2000 the other day. Great box - easy to set up and all that. I would guess that the thing to do is either get a PPC that can compile compatible binaries (possibly running Hard Hat), or set up a dev environment for cross compiling. Montavista likely sells a development environment for their OS, so that might be an easy way to get started. Personally, I would try to find a powerpc that is similar and copy the OS off the cyclades for development. That way, you could minimize the surprises.

    1. Re:Just got a couple by Sunda666 · · Score: 2, Informative

      In fact, MontaVista offers their "journeyman" edition for download. It seems to include all the cross compilers needed for the 8xx (ix86 host). Unfortunately all PPCs around are running MacOS ;-), and installing HH in them is a bit rough ;-)

      --


      ``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
    2. Re:Just got a couple by Phork · · Score: 1

      since this device seems to run linux, there must be gcc that can compile for it, and uasauly(always?) gcc can be built as a cross compiler, so you can build on your x86 linux box(or even in cygwin) binaries for it. this is how a large amount of embedded devloping is done.

      --
      -- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.