[rescue] The Practical Guide to FDDI

[Dave McGuire]

On Thursday, March 27, 2003, at 06:01 PM, jwbirdsa at picarefy.com wrote:
>    I've finally gotten around to writing the guide I wish I'd had when 
> I
> started getting into FDDI last year. As the title implies, it's focused
> on the practical aspects: here's what you need, here's what it looks 
> like,
> and this is how you hook it together.
>
>    It's the most recent update listed at www.siliconsamsara.org. For 
> those
> of you who know FDDI: what technical mistakes have I made? For those 
> of you
> who don't: what have I left out that you'd like to know? Does it really
> cover everything needed to start using FDDI from scratch?

   Nice work.  I will go over it in more detail later on.

   It might be worth mentioning that SysKonnect (at least) is currently 
making very high-end FDDI cards for several busses...I use their 
64bit/66MHz PCI FDDI interfaces in my larger Sun machines.  They 
*scream* and their Solaris drivers are very good.  I've run sustained 
99.5Mbps total between four hosts in an unswitched FDDI network with 
those cards with minimal CPU utilization.  They're expensive though, 
unless you find a moron on eBay who thinks FDDI is some old "classic" 
technology (it's much newer and more "modern" than ethernet) who is 
selling them cheaply.  I've gotten pretty lucky that way.

   Speaking of which...it might be a good idea to include a link to 
Sun's "FDDI Position Paper" for folks who think we run FDDI because 
it's some sort of "obsolete curiosity".

   http://www.sun.com/products/networking/sunfddi/fddi_position.html

       -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "I've grown hair again, just
St. Petersburg, FL           for the occasion."       -Doc Shipley