New subject: EISA SCSI boards available

10 Feb 2002

On Feb 10, 15:21, Tony Duell wrote:
...
  > It's a pain to make proper AUI cables, but if
they're short, you can use
...

 But IMHO less of a pain than tracing faults cause by so-called AUI cables
 that are nothing of the sort! 
<grin>  No other comment neccessary or desired.

...
   lower-quality
cable.  It's multiple coax inside.  You should be able to 
 Is it? The drop cable I got was 4 twisted pairs. A thicker one for the
 power connections and 3 more for the Tx, Rx, Collision pairs. With an
 overall foil screen. 
Hmm... I was about to say that's one of the cheaper office-type cables.
 I'd forgotten that the cables are actually four individually screened
twisted pairs plus a pair for power.  But if yours is only a single overall
screen, then it's not full-spec AUI, which is thick, about 1cm diameter or
a little more, very unwieldy, and bright blue.  Not that it matters if it
works -- the only difference between office-rated cables and the full-spec
ones is that the office-spec is limited to a maximum of 12m (possibly less
for some makes) while the full-spec is rated to 50m.  It does mean that for
some applications, office-spec won't do; for example if you use an AUI
concentrator (the best-known being a DELNI) that isn't a repeater and it
has an equivalent cable length which is quite long (15m ?), so you have to
be careful about the length of office cables you attach to it.

...
  Finding the proper cable in short lengths (i.e. not a
100m reel) is the
 hard part. Soldering up the DA15 connectors is pretty easy. 
The best way is to find a long blue AUI cable and cut it up.  For some
reason, I find long ones are more common than short ones.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York

10Base-FL