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QL 1000
Series
Chapter 1 - Introduction
The information in this section will give you a better understanding of the operation and configuration of the Cubix QL Series products. Please take a few minutes to read the information, it will make the installation process easier to follow and understand.
QL series boards are "slave-type" boards that fit directly into the bus of your file server or external bridge system. Each board has one or more processors, each with its own cpu, memory, video, and I/O ports. These processors are PC/XT-compatible computers, but without such extras as cases, power supplies, monitors, and keyboards.
You install these boards just like any other LAN Adapter and workstation under NetWare, with a couple of additional steps. You install the drivers, run our installation program, install the boards, and modify or create a batch file to load your application program.
QL Series boards act as diskless workstations under NetWare. This is the hardest part for technical people to understand, especially if they haven't had previous experience with diskless workstations. We will explain this subject thoroughly to clear up any confusion and mystery about these products, and to make them easier to understand and install.
Comparing the QL Series boards to regular network workstations is like comparing apples and oranges. They are both the same (fruit) but yet they aren't both the same (taste). The following diagrams will show you the similarities and differences of both products.
Figure 1-1 shows the main hardware differences between a regular PC network workstation and a QL Series board. Each product is set up with a modem for dial-in communications. You will notice the main difference: the QL Series Board lacks most of the hardware of the PC workstation:
Case: All that sheet metal takes up a lot of space.
Power Supply: We use power from the server's bus, just like any other plug-in board.
Monitor and Keyboard: We don't need these because the user dialing into the modem has them at his or her end. There is no reason to duplicate all this hardware. We do provide you with software that lets you use a monitor and keyboard on your workstation as the QL Series board's monitor and keyboard.
Disk Drive: Instead of booting from a disk in a physical drive, we create a Workstation Boot Diskette and make a file that is an image of the diskette. The QL boards all boot from this Boot Image File located in the file server's \LOGIN subdirectory.
Lan Adapters: Built into the board, it communicates directly across the bus, eliminating boards in the file server and the workstation.
Cables: QL Series boards don't require LAN cables, either.
Figure 1-2 shows the difference between a Boot Diskette for a regular workstation and the Boot Image File for a QL series board processor. Both accomplish the same results - they boot up their workstation, connect it to the server, and display the Novell LOGIN prompt.
The additional files used by the QL Series boards are there to make your job easier, and are unique to the Cubix products. We give you a default batch file (QLUSER.BAT) to load your communications program, or any application you wish to automatically load. Or if you wish, you can create your own unique batch file for each Cubix processor by adding its network node number to the batch file name.
Now you know the similarities between regular network workstations and QL Series workstations. They both can log in users, execute LOGIN scripts, run application software, send print jobs to the server, and all the other things workstations are designed to do.
QL Series boards, however, don't require monitors and keyboards. To see what the boards are doing, administrators use our QLVision screen redirector function. QLVision and other utilities make the administrator's job as easy as possible.
Thanks for taking time to read this. We at Cubix Customer Service Support System feel that if you understand how the product works, the rest is a whole lot easier.
This document, and all Web contents, Copyright © 1997
by Cubix Corp., Carson City, NV, USA.
