[rescue] New SPARCStation 10 owner, needs help with some issues though.

[Carl R. Friend]

On 02/05/2016 07:50 PM, Andrew Jones wrote:

> I have had trouble getting an 'le' device to work on any switch, at all.

    Lance interfaces work just fine.  Sometimes, depending on what
sort of comms gear you're plugging into, it may require pinning the
switch at 10Mb/s half-duplex, but from my experience, that's it.

    Out of curiosity, since this is primarily about a SPARCstation
10, do 10s have an AUI interface as well?  Mine is 50 miles distant
through unpleasant conditions at the moment.  AUI -- contemplate
that for a moment and then realise why "duplex" is meaningless.

> Not just the negotiation thing, just getting 10 mbps of throughput
> instead of 2 mbps seems to really confuse the boot firmware.

    Nobody is going to get anywhere close to 10 Mbps through any
sort of a half-duplex Ethernet connection.  It's just not going
to happen.

    For the history innocent, recall that Ethernet, as originally
conceived, was a CSMA/CD (Carrier Sense, Multiple Access with
Collision Detection) medium built around a commonly-shared length
of coaxial cable.  In later revisions this was 10 Mbps. This does not
mean that was the throughput of the thing, not even for a network
consisting of two machines alone on a length of wire -- and the
interfaces of the day were not designed to anything else for the
simple reason that there wasn't anything else.

    "Ethernet" of today looks nothing like its genesis, save for the
pitifully small MTU given the speeds now attainable by switched
fabrics (which are as far from a shared-medium as one can get).
Let's not confuse the idioms.

    Cheers!

-- 
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| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | Boylston            |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
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