FDDI cables

From: Dave McGuire <mcguire_at_neurotica.com>
Date: Wed Jul 25 17:02:47 2001

On July 25, Dan Wright wrote:
> OK, so I've managed to scrounge up some free FDDI hardware from various places
> around the U of Illinois (several boards and a concentrator), but I've been

  Free cards and concentrator, eh? Nice deal!

> stuck at one problem point for several months: I have no cables, and new cables
> are expensive, and I can't find used cables anywhere (except ebay where I'm not
> sure I trust them). So, does anyone have FDDI cables, for sale or trade?
> I need both FDDI MIC-MIC cables and MIC-ST cables (I got a DEC DEFPA PCI card
> for my PC that uses ST connectors, I think because the MIC connectors are too

  My entire network of about thirty machines is FDDI, except for a few
stragglers on ethernet. ALL of my cables, except for one or two, came
from eBay. Speaking as both a relatively heavy buyer and seller on
eBay, the eBay trust issue is effectively addressed, in my opinion, by
the feedback mechanism.

  If you go to buy some FDDI cables from some seller who has a dozen
negative feedback comments complaining about bad cables, well, don't
buy from that seller. :)

> big to fit on the back of a PCI card...) I really want to get my very own
> wacky dual-counter-rotating-ring topology network going in my apartment :)

  Wacky? Umm, no. Spewing a packet onto a shared medium and then
detecting the presence of noise on the line to indicate a collision,
then retransmitting at a random interval until the packet gets through
is wacky. Deploying 100baseT everywhere and then putting everything
on a MAC-layer-bridged port (thus defeating one of the primary design
principles of the networking technology in use) to get anywhere near a
usable level of performance is wacky.

              -Dave McGuire
Received on Wed Jul 25 2001 - 17:02:47 BST