USB Ethernet and OS 9

[EvilCapitalist]

Picked up a Beige G3 desktop with a dead Ethernet port (looks like the cord was yanked out of it rather abruptly since the port is completely trashed) and was wondering if there are any USB Ethernet adapters that are known to work in OS 9.1.  The machine already has all the PCI slots filled by a video card, SCSI card, and USB/Firewire combo card so just using a PCI Ethernet card isn't an option. 

I know Micro Center sells several USB Ethernet adapters, none of which come with driver CDs but all say they support OS X 10.4 and higher (so I would hope that OS 9 support wouldn't be too much of an ask), but I'd rather not play the buy and try game if I can help it.  Anyone have any experience with these adapters or know of an adapter that will work in OS 9?

http://www.microcenter.com/product/444552/UED011_USB_20_to_Fast_Ethernet_Adapter

http://www.microcenter.com/product/438226/H50223_USB_20_to_Ethernet_LAN_10-100Mbps_Portable_Network_Adapter

http://www.microcenter.com/product/406852/TU2-ET100_USB_to_Fast_Ethernet_Adapter

 

[NJRoadfan]

Doubtful. SMC made one that was OS9 compatible: http://www.edge-core.com/temp/edm/old_downloads/ds/DS_SMC2208USB_ETH.pdf

 

[mrpippy]

I took a look at SMC's site at archive.org and found that product, but no OS 9 drivers are listed (and other data sheets don't list OS 9 compatibility). It probably uses the RTL8150 chipset (which other sites list as having OS 9 compat), but I haven't found any drivers.

I think your only options are to either desolder/replace the jack, or get one of those fancy USB/FW/Enet PCI combo cards.

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Thankfully, those seem to be cheap and plentiful on eBay and the box most definitely shows OS 9 support so I'll give that a go.  Oddly enough, I used to have this exact adapter but a liquid spill did it in.  Though at that point I hadn't started collecting truly vintage Macs yet.

 

[NJRoadfan]

I wouldn't expect blazing performance from a USB1.1 NIC, but OS9 doesn't support 2.0 anyway!

 

[EvilCapitalist]

I'd be surprised if an OS9 era machine could saturate a 100MB link in any event.  My HTPCs weren't able to saturate a gigabit link until I went to SSDs.

 

[flashedbios2012]

If i were you id search for a PCI ethernet card.  The onboard network i do believe was only 10 megabit anyways.  Would say that the scsi card is probably redundant since it has onboard scsi

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Correct, the onboard was just 10Base-T.  The SCSI card is staying since it's SCSI-3/68 Pin.  It's a non-issue now anyways since I received the USB ethernet card I ordered and it does indeed work under OS 9 (with the driver on the included CD).

 

[butterburger]

Good for you, EvilCapitalist! Would you be willing to upload an image of that CD to Macintosh Garden?

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Certainly; I don't think the whole CD (including the Windows drivers) is more than 20MB.

 

[EvieSigma]

So is there a limit to the connection speed OS 9 can handle?

I figured there would be some kind of limit, but I've idly wondered if a 10/100/1000 card would make any difference over the 10/100 port built into my G3.

 

[EvilCapitalist]

You're going to run into disk throughput bottlenecks since the onboard controllers (SCSI or IDE) are going to top out below what 100 megabit can sustain, let alone gigabit.

 

[rsolberg]

If we're talking about a blue and white G3, its ATA bus allows up to 33 MiB/s. The beige G3s are 16.7 MiB/s, IIRC.

Here's the maximum throughput of Ethernet:

10-Base T: 1.25 MB/s

100-Base TX: 12.5 MB/s

Gigabit: 100 MB/s

Note that Gigabit uses 8/10-bit encoding, thus each byte transferred takes up ten bits instead of eight. This is why its throughput is 100 rather than 125 MB/s.

As for being able to utilise Gigabit on Mac OS 9, you can, as long as a driver is available. On any operating system, the drivers and networking stack may add some overhead, so usable throughput may be less than the figures above. Apple shipped a few Mac OS 9 native machines with Gigabit built in ("Gigabit Ethernet" G4s and later) and these work fine on Gigabit LANs.

Do note that Gigabit can come close to saturating a PCI bus, so mileage may vary, but I'd expect actual throughput to exceed 20 MiB/s on a B&W G3 with a healthy hard drive.

 

[mrpippy]

All the OS 9-capable G4s with gigabit ethernet used Apple UniNorth/GEM Ethernet, which they never sold as a PCI card. But apparently there are OS 9 drivers for Realtek 8169-based cards, which are gigabit capable. 

http://www.everymac.com/mac-answers/mac-os-9-classic-support-faq/gigabit-ethernet-for-macos-9-wireless-pc-cards-macos-9-compatible.html

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/6819-really-cheap-gigabit-ethernet-for-os-9/

I remember watching an old keynote (I think a MacWorld from 1999 or 2000) where Phil and Steve did a bake-off showing OS 9 copying files from OS X Server, vs an NT4 client/server. I think it was 100 Mbit, but the impressive result was that OS 9 could copy as fast as the NT4 systems (both saturating the ethernet link), despite OS 9's technical shortcomings.

 

[Cory5412]

Another thing that can be done to overcome disk transfer limitations of a G3 or G4's onboard IDE link is to replace it with a PCI SATA card. There are other potential in-ram or netboot types of scenarios where gig-ethernet would be useful on something running OS 9.

The other use case isn't using OS 9 as a server, but using OS 9 as a client in a network with a high performance file server that can speak AFP over IP or AppleTalk. (Think: XServe, Windows Server 2003, Netatalk-on-Linux, Mac OS X 10.4/10.5 on pretty fast Intel hardware, that kind of thing.)

 

[butterburger]

(I forgot to say it sooner.)

Thank you, EvilCapitalist!

Preserving and sharing are acts of caring.

 

[trag]

I'm using a Realtek 8169 based card in my S900 based frankenmac (8500/9500 clone) under OS 8.6 and 9.1. I haven't done any benchmarking ( disks aren't all that fast anyway) but the switch in closet thinks it's connected at gigabit speeds.

Is there a way in 8 or 9 to get a CP to tell you the connection speed? I have a vague memory of wrestling the info out of Tiger...