"Craig Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> (There's no concept of a
> crossover cable in Broken Ring....err Token Ring)
You know I've usually found that the folks who call it "broken ring" really
haven't studied it too well. Its a damn nice protocol, with a heck of a lot
more functionality than the controlled chaos of Ethernet. Too bad its bound
to go the way of Betamax (also a superior product to its competitors).
> Wrap is for
> management, you can configure MAUs to only allow certain MAC addresses,
> and if a mac address is used that isn't int the list, the port will wrap
> (go inactive).
Since the folks that run the SMC web site seem to have forgotten that SMC
ever made MAUs, I can't look this up. However, very few MAUs have this type
of functionality unless they are "smart". Usually, cheap MAUs that are
likely to be in a person's lab (which I am assuming we are talking about
here) are unpowered devices, that have no internal processor or memory, so
there's no way they could filter any MAC addresses. They just have a bunch
of electical relays in them that are switched via power delivered via the
NICs attached to them. In such a case, if you connect two MAUs together,
neither will have power to open the relay on the other one, and the ring
will not pass between them. Thus each MAU has to have some sort of manual
switch which will set the relay correctly. On IBM MAUs, simply having a
connector plugged into a RI/RO port throws the relay. An educated guess says
that on SMC the "wrap" button is a manual switch to open/close the relay.
---JRE---
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