Adding Fibre to network diet - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

24 Mar 2001

On Mar 24, 18:25, Mike Ford wrote:
...
  I was at Micro Center last night (in So Cal) and they
had a stack of grey
 flip top bins with a 99 cent cable sale. Since I have thousands of cables
 at home I pawed through it to the bottom of the four bins on top and peeked
...
  into one of the bins below. Lots of AC power cords,
but I did pull out
 about a 20' section of some kind of fibre. Since I know a have a AUI FDDI
 type mau's I am guessing putting a section of fibre in my ethernet network
...
  is fairly practical. Any suggestions on how to do it?

FDDI is a ring system, not point to point like FOIRL and 10baseFL, and it's
*not* Ethernet.  It uses different protocols.  I can't remember if you can
have a ring as small as 2 nodes, but I don't see why not.  Anyone?

What kind of fibre it is (backbone or patch lead; 50/125 or 62/125
multimode or single mode)?  Is the fibre terminated with suitable
connectors?  If not, it won't be cheap to get connectors put on the ends.
 Is it damaged (rudementary test by shining a bright light down it, though
that will only tell you if it's really badly damaged, it won't tell you
much else about losses).  IIRC, FDDI uses lasers rather than LEDs (FOIRL
and 10baseFL use LEDs) so don't look into them!

If your MAUs really are FDDI, take a look at the FDDI FAQ at
http://www.cicese.mx/~aarmenta/frames/redes/fddi/FDDIFAQ.html and the FDDI
tutorial at http://www.iol.unh.edu/training/fddi/htmls/index.html.

-- 

Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						Dept. of Computer Science
						University of York