roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (02/05/86)
In an effort to save cabling costs for our planned workstation network, we are considering alternatives to the standard big yellow cable with a transceiver for each node. We have not yet settled on Sun as the vendor, but if we do we'll probably want to do something like this: <==//===========X=========================X=================X=====//==> # # # # ------- ------- # | /50 | . . . | /50 | ---------- # ---------- ------- ------- | Vax- | --------- | Sun- | | 11/750 |####| DELNI |####| 3/160C | ---------- --------- ---------- ------- ------- # # | /50 | . . . | /50 | # # ------- ------- ---------- # # ---------- | | | Sun- |####### #######| Sun- |-------x-----------------x-----//--> | 3/180S | | 3/180S | ---------- ---------- Key: === Fat Ethernet cable --- Thin Ethernet cable X Ethernet transceiver x Thin coax "tee" fitting ### Ethernet drop cable | Thin drop cable One 3/180 will be file-serving for the diskless nodes directly connected to it via the thin cable. Those nodes, both 3/180's, the 3/160, and the 11/750 will all be physically near each other. The other 3/180 will be serving the 3/160 and the other diskless nodes. Naturally, we'll want to do rlogin's and ftp between everything. In addition, we'll probably have other stuff on the cable (and the DELNI) eventually. Does anybody have any experience with mixing these various types of cabling? Are there any problems I should be aware of? Is the DELNI really transparent; does it act just like a passive device? Any problems running NFS and ND through it? We're a suspicious of the thin cable altogether. Besides the length limitations, what are the differences between it and regular Ethernet? How does the software treat the thin segment? Do I end up with two logically distinct networks which need some sort of software gateway between them? If this is the case, does the standard IPC software handle this or will I need some other package to implement the gateway? -- Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016