sjc@CURLY.ITI.ORG (Steven J. Clark) (07/16/90)
Although you are not supposed to, you can often get away with simply connecting thin and thick ethernet cables together with a barrel-to-bnc connector. It may cause reflections and noise, but if you're lucky it won't. You can buy a box to bridge between thin and thick ethernet, or you can get a second ethernet board for one of your (non-Xerox) machines and set up a gateway. I know a second ethernet board for a Sun Sparcstation 1 or 1+ costs about $500. A bridge is a repeater that makes the two cables act like a single net. A gateway is smarter (and thus needs orders of magnitude more administration) and forwards packets from one net to the other as appropriate. You can get "smart" bridges that are essentially gateways, and you can get really confusing by doing things like bridging the two cables for PUP and NS, but treating them as separate nets with a gateway for TCP/IP. -Steve sjc@iti.org