Twisted pair (StarLan) to ThinNet

[~XT6561110~Frank McGee~C23~L25~6326~]

 [ lots of things about 1base5 and 10base5 deleted ]

1base5 describes how 1 Mb Starlan works; don't know if their is an
equivalent 1baseT standard for 1 Mb 802.3 twisted pair networks.

10base5 describes ethernet (WHICH IS THE SAME THING AS STARLAN 10).

10baseT describes the wiring and hardware inter-connection characteristics
of ethernet over twisted pair.

You can't directly connect a 10baseT network to a 1 Mb Starlan
network; you need to put a bridge in between.

>The comments about (hardware/firmware) bridges are valid, but there seems to
>be a software incompatibility at a "higher" layer between the 1Mb/s and 10Mb/s
>StarLAN implementations (or else I and many others around the country are
>simply hallucinating the problems! :-)

Actually there isn't if you're using ISO software (Starlan 3.x).  All
you do is stick a Starlan 10:1 bridge between the 1 Mb and 10 Mb
networks, and everything comes up real fine and dandy.  It works
very well.  In fact, a while back we set up a big network for a
sales training class that had 1 Mb MSDOS PC's, 10 Mb MSDOS PC's, a
10:1 bridge, a Cayman Systems Gator Box, a Mac, a Sun, and a
roomfull of 3B and 6386/25 servers.  In addition, we tied the whole
thing into our building lab net, and people could access our file
servers that we work off of here.  The TCP/IP environment worked for
all 1 and 10 Mb hosts (ie, you could atleast ping each other, and
telnet to the multi-user systems) and those that had some sort of
NFS package could share files.  On the Starlan side, all the
machines that had some sort of Starlan software support were running
RFS, you could get terminal service to the multi-user systems, and
the MSDOS users could get file and print service.

If you consider the items out on our building network, it also
includes 3B20's, 3B15's, 3B4000's, and a Vax.

And all of this ran over the same wire, with a 10:1 bridge in
between the 1 Mb network and 10 Mb network.

Through carefull engineering, you can do a LOT with the Starlan
products.

I haven't heard of ANYONE having problems with 10:1 bridges if they
are using 3.0 or later Starlan software.

-- 
Frank McGee, AT&T
Entry Level Systems Support
attmail!fmcgee (preferred)
att!cuuxb!fmcgee (those that can't reach attmail)