From: "Andreas Meyer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Hello Iljitsch!
>
> You wrote:
>
> >> I thought it is much faster than 100Mbps ethernet because of the
> >> fiber-technologie...
> >> Is FDDI a kind of TokenRing-technologie?
> >
> > Yes, it is. Actually fiber is "slower" than copper: the speed of
light in
> > optical fiber is 200.000 km/s, while the speed of electricity in
copper
> > is 300.000 km/s. But 100 megabits per second is always 100 megabits
per
>
> of course. But what are the advantages of fiber compared with copper?
> the indistructibility? I assume it is more difficult to handle?
Definitely not indestructability. The fiber is, after all, glass. Copper
is more robust, easier to handle (now that's an understatement: fiber
practically demands a welding station if you want to attach "pipes", and
attaching the connectors isn't easy either), but the electrical
properties (capacitance being possibly the ultimate hurdle) hurt the
performance at high speed. With a fiber you can shove multiple
frequencies through the pipe, and it's naturally unsensitive to all
electric and magnetic disturbances (unless the fields are ridiculously
strong, but then the people would be in danger too, and the equipment
wouldn't work either:).
> > second, so FDDI and fast ethernet share the same bitrate. The
overhead is
> > quite different, though. They both perform pretty well when just one
> > station is sending. When all stations are sending a little ethernet
has
> > the advantage: no waiting for the token. When all stations are
sending a
> > lot FDDI wins, because the bandwidth is more or less evenly
distributed
> > and it's easy to fill up the entire bandwidth. With ethernet you get
a
> > lot of collisions that all waste a little time and bandwidth. Still,
> > switched fast ethernet wins from FDDI every time.
>
> I guess I would have to look for a hub with a built-in switch. But for
a
I'd look for a small switch, maybe 5 10/100 ports. Those start from
around FIM 1000 (under EUR 170) here. In fact, I think I'll get one next
month, and leave my hub for all things coax and maybe 10base-T.
> little network with 3 or 4 computers and one server, sending or
receiving
> MBytes of files, I wonder how much time is wasted because of
collisions
> or if it is neglectible. Aren�t there any collisions with a switch?
Whether it's negligible depends on what you demand. :) I have 3 PCs in
my LAN, so far all using 10base-T. I don't think the collisions cause
more than maybe a 1 % increase in transmission time, and I often
transfer gigabytes (those ISO images are *big*:). This would of course
require only one receiving/transmitting computer pair. There shouldn't
be collisions with unicasts, but my experience doesn't agree. Multicasts
are a different thing, but you probably won't use them often (I'm under
the impression that samba/Windows file sharing uses multicasts to find
out what's out there in the net; am I right?).
> hm, again fiber. Exact measurements of the rooms are neccesary. Is it
> flexible like cooper? (around corners and such;))
Up to a point. I can't remember what the safe radius is, but I wouldn't
bend it beyond the recommended (required?) limit defined in the EN 50167
generic cabling standard for to-be-installed cat-5, which is IIRC 20 cm.
I'd put fiber inside some protective tubing, because glass is fragile
(but you knew that:).
> When a client wants to go online to Internet, is then a router
necessary
> or would the server recognize the request by the client and goes
online?
You could say that in this case the server is also a router.
> Or must this be handled by scripts?
I should think that if all is properly set up it's automatic.
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