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).
...oh. I thought half-duplex was basically shared-bus Ethernet - that
all pairs in a collision domain would be carrying the same signal.
Clearly this was more unfounded speculation than reality. :(
Hmm. I wonder what would happen if you connect A and B's TX pairs and
C's RX pair together, and similarly for B/C TX and A RX, and C/A TX and
B RX.
Probably nothing (or at least nothing useful). Oh well. Annoying; it
looked like a simple "poor man's token ring" setup.
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