On 13/06/2007 06:58, der Mouse wrote:
This actually reminds me of something I've been
contemplating doing:
"the same thing" for twisted-pair Ethernet. That is....
For two machines, with a crossed cable, machine A's 1/2 pair goes to
machine B's 3/6 pair, and conversely.
But suppose you have three machines, and connect machine A's 1/2 to
machine B's 3/6, B's 1/2 to C's 3/6, and C's 1/2 to A's 3/6.
Obviously
you'd have to set all interfaces involved half-duplex for it to have
any hope of working (so each non-sending host will feed through the
signal it gets to the next host in the ring)
That's not what half-duplex does. HD doesn't make each interface pass on
what it receives, it just ensures that nothing is transmitted while
receiving (or, if it is, that's a collision).
...but will it work if you do that?
I wouldn't expect so, without some additional software. In principle,
given software support, you could pass things around like that. You'd
need to use something like UDP that doesn't expect the sort of software
handshaking that TCP does. It's perfectly possible to have a machine
listen to the Rx side while the Tx is not connected to anything (we
sometimes use that for a demo to snoop on traffic) and similarly it's
possible to transmit while the receive side is connected to nothing more
than a link pulse generator.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York