Everything Else

At the time I built out my network, everyone was dumping FDDI. I could get FDDI adapters for everything {Sun and SGI}. I got 3 SMC FDDI station with switch plug cards supporting 10baset, and FDDI-SC. I also got a Cisco FDDI station that had 100baseT,and 1000baseT hookups. I could connect everything demo 4D's Indy's, Indigo's, O2, Octanes and origin & Onyx's to at least 100baseT next works. Plus the old MooTron, and Sunstations is anyone remembers. Those were fun days - cable and wires everywhere :-)

I would kill for a working KL-1090, or a one of the multiprocessors from the 70 and 80's; anything without an Intel or modern CPU.

I used FDDI for awhile, since I couldn't afford fast ethernet for my Indy. For awhile I used a SparcStation to route between it's fast ethernet and FDDI. Then I bought a 3Com CoreBuilder 3500 which had fast ethernet (fiber and copper), gigabit fiber, and FDDI. That was a pretty neat convergence. I think to start using FDDI again (my house is being remodeled and I've put a lot of fiber in the wall), but, at this point, it is more expense and trouble than it is worth. I do miss all the strands of orange draped all over the place.

FDDI double ring ? 200Mbit/s ?
I think I would be a good idea for a backbone between two servers located in different buildings / rooms

jodys wrote: I used FDDI for awhile, since I couldn't afford fast ethernet for my Indy.

In my own experience, FDDI on a switch would give significantly faster, more reliable performance than fast Ethernet on Indys and Challenges, so if you have all the equipment, I'd recommend that any day over Ethernet.

ivelegacy wrote: FDDI double ring ? 200Mbit/s ?
I think I would be a good idea for a backbone between two servers located in different buildings / rooms

IIRC, the double ring was just a redundancy thing. You could lose one fiber and things would stay up.

isn't possible to use the second ring for bonding purpose (doubling the bandwidth) ?

I pulled a fair amount of OM4 cabling before we finished in the house (I'm trying to be ready for when 10Gb and higher gets cheap). I'm looking around it appears that OM4 _should_ be backward compatible with FDDI.

OM4 Specifications
• Effective Modal Bandwidth (EMB) >/= 4700 MHz-km – Allows 2 methods for verification– DMD Masks or EMBc
• OFL Bandwidth at 850nm >/= 3500 MHz-km
– Ensures performance with sources that launch more power into
outer modes
• OFL Bandwidth at 1300nm >/= 500 MHz-km
– Ensures backward compatibility with OM1, OM2, OM3 fibers for applications such as FDDI, 100BASE-FX, 1000BASE-LX, etc.

However, I have none of the equipment anymore. The Indy adapter card and my old bridge/router are long gone...

ivelegacy wrote: isn't possible to use the second ring for bonding purpose (doubling the bandwidth) ?

Not all FDDI cards can attach to both rings (Single-Attach Stations only have one port). So a network that used both rings at the same time would not be able to communicate with SAS. The way FDDI is designed each DAS station is in a particular "ring-op mode", using either Ring A, Ring B, Looping A->B, Looping B->A, or isolated. The protocol defined how it chooses a mode and recovers when the other ring is reconnected.
You also cannot have full-duplex 100Mbit with FDDI unless you use proprietary systems (like DEC Gigaswitch). The normal ring is not switched and therefore half duplex, and so are normal concentrators.

*giggles*

I'll show myself out...

guardian542 wrote: I'll show myself out...

Hey we buy from those guys!

We control all our power systems through fiber, that way when they flash over there's no conductive path back to our sorry asses...

vishnu wrote: no conductive path back

clever fox

jodys wrote: Then I bought a 3Com CoreBuilder 3500 which had fast ethernet (fiber and copper), gigabit fiber, and FDDI. That was a pretty neat convergence.

The downside of core switches is they're big, loud and power hungry animals.

That's why I'm using a relatively modest Cisco WS-C1400 FDDI concentrator, with SAS (single attach) connections to the SGI workstations, and a DAS (dual attach) uplink to the "main ring". In my case, the only other station on the "main ring" is a little Linux router box which routes between ethernet and FDDI network segments (FDDI uses a different, larger MTU than ethernet so bridging isn't trivial). In the past my Linux server used to do this, but my current server only has PCIe slots so I turned the FDDI router into a dedicated appliance using and old mini-ITX atom board.

skywriter wrote: At the time I built out my network, everyone was dumping FDDI. I could get FDDI adapters for everything {Sun and SGI}. [...] I could connect everything demo 4D's Indy's, Indigo's, O2, Octanes and origin & Onyx's to at least 100baseT next works.

I think a lot of that (and the guts of a lot of 4D hardware) ended up at my place at some point

Did you ever see equipment for FDDI-II? It was supposed to have rate-reservation/isochronous features for video delivery systems. I've read a little about it but never seen the hw.

robespierre wrote: Did you ever see equipment for FDDI-II?

Nope, I only ever saw one or two whitepapers.

What I have is fairly standard. 4D series with VME FDDI cards (which are modified Interphase V/FDDI 4211 design), GIO32 and GIO64 FDDIXpress cards for Indigo, Indy and Indigo2, and a HIO64 dual FDDI card which mounts on the IO4 of a Challenge/Onyx. Basically everything before 100baseT was standard. There's a PCI FDDIXpress card in my Origin 200, and I have a couple of SysKonnect PCI FDDI cards for Linux systems. There's one in that router box in that last photo.

Everything I have is optical. No CDDI here.

lucky you are guys, I am going to order a few modules , planning to attach them to my home-made m68k board. The good news, those lan modules come for cheap and easy to be attached and programmed, the bad news there are is optical choice, just ethernet (Ethernet controller, and Ethernet LAN transformer, including the Ethernet Collision detect unit)

I'm still swimming in those damn AUI to ST fiber transceivers. I don't think I'll ever build anything practical out of this arrangement unless I get a much larger 100base FX switch and some sensible pre-terminated lengths of fiber.

Yeah, I agree. AUI in 10mhz, I doubt theres any buffing in your transceiver', so you're slowing your FDDI ring down to abizmal. Now I'm now sure you're running FDDI at all. There are ST-ST cables with a centralized FDDI 'concentrator' of source, or you can string into a ring without a 'concentrator', depending on the connector types you have.

At one time I was going to fish some ST-ST multimode through the wall and use it to connect my two concentrators into a dual loop.
So I acquired some passive ST-FSD couplers because my WS-C1400 use FSD cables (apparently they also can use SC port cards but I've never seen them). The couplers were very hard to source, maybe not available any more.