[rescue] lanplex 2500

[Gregory Leblanc]

On Thu, 2001-09-13 at 12:38, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> I find myself the winner of an ebay auction for a 3com lanplex (aka
> corebuilder) 2500 switch with 2 8port 10baseT and 1 2port FDDI cards.  
> 
> Is there anything I should know about this?  I'm hoping that I can just
> plug it in and go when it arrives.

They're pretty nice little units, although I don't know how well they
can bridge FDDI.  They seemed to keep up with 16x10MBit fiber and 1
100Mbit copper.  At least as well as can be expected on a network
designed by total incompetents.

> 3com has quite a bit of documentation about it.  Apparently it was a $17k
> piece of hardware in 1997.  Quite a difference from what I'm paying for it
> (<$100).  It appears that there is a 100baseTX card available for
> it.  Anyone have a line on getting them?

I don't have a line on one, but it's a single port card.  The max FE
this unit can handle is 2 ports.  I don't think they're -that- rare, but
certainly not too common.  By the time you needed more FE than that, the
3500 was available (it's a much more capable unit).  

The only bad thing about the LP2500s that I've noticed is that they're
super sensitive to surges/static.  There's this little eeprom in there
that gets its brain fried fairly often.  Easy to fix, but still a bit of
a pain.
	Greg