Ethernet -- thicknet and thinnet before 10BaseT

From: Bill Pechter <pechter_at_bg-tc-ppp1689.monmouth.com>
Date: Sat Jul 28 07:16:48 2001

> > Now 10/100 switches really screw with it.
>
> Those switches are just bridges, which have been around for decades (albeit
> with fewer ports).
>
> --
> Pete Peter Turnbull
> Network Manager
> University of York

But bridges originally just repeat...
-- maybe they do the old 1987 spanning tree loop avoidance...
-- maybe they learn and eventually send just the traffic for the remote end

But in the beginning they were dumb repeaters.
And the network was a dumb wire... Coax. How dumb can it get.

Now everything's full duplex and troubleshooting the network
involves having to set up special spanning ports
where the old advantage to ethernet was any port could be a network
monitorring/troubleshooting port seeing all the network traffic.

My old laptop was great and could do most of what the Network General
sniffer would do... Now we've got to have a much more involved
method of troubleshooting and we're left hoping Cisco and the other
vendors have got the OS's and roms right in the network.

I'm wondering how long it is before DECnet and Appletalk fail to work
on some modern networks because of the smart switches screwing up.
Nowadays it almost seems they expect everything to be all TCP/IP.

Bill



---
  Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a 
  villain in a James Bond movie              -- Dennis Miller 
  bpechter_at_shell.monmouth.com|pechter_at_pechter.dyndns.org
Received on Sat Jul 28 2001 - 07:16:48 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:33:54 BST