johnmark@COYOTE.STANFORD.EDU (John Mark Agosta) (08/06/89)
> Connecting each office to a port on the StarController would prove > to be far too expensive. How have others done this ? Your suggestion of anchoring a star with six arms at each port of the STAR controller is ambitious. I find that definately 2, sometimes 3 and with luck, 4 branches can be run off of each STAR port. Further, you want to have 60 nodes and probably in the near future more; you will need probably need two zones. I have been renovating a 50 node net with two STAR controllers against which, over time, various sins have been committed: Users have added branches to their local appleTalk run, or abandoned branches when machines were moved, etc. After over 100 hours of painstaking tracing and diagnosis I have acquired a fine sense of the tradeoffs of doing the job right initially verses muddling through a network expansion by shortsighted avoidance of costs. And I still don't have network running, and alot of people are upset because this makes it difficult for them to do their job. Consider these numbers: $1,500 - Another Star controller. $35 x 100 = $3,500 - Costs so far in labor to diagnose my faulty net. $500 x 50 = $25,000 - Order of maginitude cost for hardware for the a "typical" ethernet. $3000 x 50 = $150,000 - Order of magnitude of the value of the machines that depend on the net to function. If you install the net and you cannot get it to work reliably, you may generate alot of frustration, hard feeling and high pressure work for yourself. My recommendation is that in light of this it is not worth scrimping to save a few tens of dollars a node. -johnmark John Mark Agosta Box 4847 Stanford, CA 94309