eliminator (Nortel Contivity Extranet Switch 1500)

I saw this when looking at old network gear. Barely twice as wide as a floppy drive I thought it looked like a cool mini PC. Port selection made it look slightly modern (usb ports), but the design looked rather old like Pentium era. Anyway I took the seller's offer and had this mini machine a week later.

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The plastic panels are awkwardly clipped in place. Requires some flexing and sliding the panels to disengage from the metal frame. Some were already damaged, but some epoxy should keep enough clips intact to make it solid. The metal frame is heavy duty and completely encases the machine. Very bombproof.

Inside, the machine splits into two halves. One side carries the open frame power supply, drives, and a fan. The other has the motherboard, daughterboard, and pci card. Between them there is just the ATX power, IDE, floppy, and fan cables.

Opened case

It has a 10GB Quantium IDE drive. Initial boot seemed to hang, but the screen had mention of "vxcore". Not sure exactly what it's running, but I suspect old VxWorks. Anyway it hangs with a 0 -> prompt after claiming a bad EEPROM checksum. I'll look at the disk contents later. Disk is much too loud and is going to be swapped for a IDE/MSATA SSD adapter.

vxcore boot display output

I swapped the 64 MB DIMM for a pair of 256 MB DIMMS. The first DIMMS I tried didn't work, but even though this pair was ECC (M374S6453CTS-C7A) it booted fine. A bit overkill (PC-133) even though this board has no provision for going above the 66 MHz bus, but it is what I had spare.

After browsing the manual I noticed most of the PC connectors are supposed to be covered. The only real interface is the serial port. With that hooked up I got to a login prompt, but none of my password guesses worked so I'm leaving it. At least it apppears to be a functioning install if I ever want to play with it.

                            Nortel Networks System Boot

Nortel Networks Extranet Access Switch
Copyright (c) 1999-2001 Nortel Networks, Inc.
Boot Image Version: V04_06
Creation date: Oct 17 2002, 15:14:39

auto-booting...  done.

Performing Check Disk on [/ide0/] ...
Copyright (c) 1993-1996 RST Software Industries Ltd. Israel. All rights reserved
ver: 2.6 FCS

Disk Check In Progress ...

        total disk space (bytes) :                    2,146,631,680
        bytes in each allocation unit :               32,768
        total allocation units on disk :              65,510
        bad allocation units :                        0
        available bytes on disk :                     2,056,028,160
        available clusters on disk :                  62,745
        maximum available contiguous chain (bytes) :  2,009,726,976
        available space fragmentation (%) :           3
        clusters allocated :                          2,765
Done Checking Disk.
Attempting to Load /ide0/system/bin/vxWorks...8073216 + 1812432 + 193104
Starting at 0xc00000...

Welcome to the Contivity Extranet Switch
Copyright 1999,2000 Nortel Networks

Version:                 V03_50.44
Creation date:           Dec  7 2000, 20:51:06

Date:                    01/01/1990
Unit Serial Number:      15508

Please enter the administrator's user name: admin
Please enter the administrator's password:

I hooked up a mSATA to IDE adapter and an 80GB SSD. I tried to install from a CD drive, but my PATA Plextor had failed. I copied the install files to the drive and ran them from there (don't forget to add and run SMARTDRV.exe to your boot floppy).

For drivers I used these files:

USB

nusb36e.exe

AudioPCI 64V

Z0368R01.exe

Dell 15" LCD

E151FP.exe

Intel 440ZX

R34506.exe or 3.20.1008.zip

Intel GD 82559 Fast Ethernet

Intel Pro Network driver CD

Onboard AGP Rage Pro Turbo

wme-j5-30-1-b02.exe

PCI Radeon 7000 64MB

6-2_wme_dd_cp_30314.exe

PCI GeForce 2 MX 400 / GeForce FX 5200

81.98_forceware_win9x_english.exe or nvidia_9x_81.98.zip

With the Rage Pro I couldn't run some of the stuff I wanted. Many games outright wouldn't run, had rendering issues, or had unplayable performance.

I got the Radeon 7000 and had good results, but a few things had issues. Gothic 2 wouldn't render properly (probably lack of T&L). I couldn't get Unreal to run. More importantly the card prevents the case from closing with a floppy drive installed. I needed a shorter, but still low-profile card.

Enter the Jaton VIDEO-118PCI-32DDR. I got the clearance necessary to close the case, but it's still tight. This card also seems to fair a lot better in supporting the class of games I have collected. As a bonus I was able to use the GeForce and onboard AGP card at the same time for multi-monitor.

Unfortunately having this PCI card installed results in the 'Motherboard Resources' device having a conflicting memory range with the onboard network card and the range can't be modified in device manager. So I can use the onboard card with networking, or use the much better PCI card and a USB network adapter.

I bought a Jaton VIDEO-228PCI-TW (GeForce FX 5200) that appears to be a hair shorter. It's a bit newer and not quite as contemporary.

Slightly shorter card

Installed the card, but it did not change the situation. I grabbed a Intel Pro Network driver CD and installed those. They were used for the network card, but didn't change the resource conflict.

Finally I reserved the address range that was conflicting with 'Motherboard Resources' in BIOS ('Resource Configuration' page). The blurb there indicates this is for reserving memory for Legacy ISA devices, but in my case it was effective at resolving the conflict.

The memory range I reserved

Since it is resolved without actually needing the FX 5200 I decided to go back to the GeForce 2 MX 400.

I ran into a few more troubles with the onboard AGP card. Some applications seem to crash because the wrong card is selected. I just opted to disable it in device manager since Windows 98 isn't really suited to 3D applications + multi-monitor and I have no intent to use it that way.