[HECnet] FDDI advice

[Brian Hechinger]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 03:19:53PM +0000, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

I think this is the one I had. Big modular thing. Maybe (and going by
really fuzzy memory here) 8U high?

I was going to say "that sounds right" based on my memory of seeing one gathering dust around here.   But the picture here: http://www.global-itcorp.com/products/digital-dec/networking/gigaswitch/ shows a much taller enclosure, half line card space and half power supply.   Each section does look like 8U or so.

Hmmm. I wonder if those can be separated. I wonder if that also means
mine never would have worked. I don't remember having the bottom half.

That was also 10 years ago, so who knows, maybe I did have the whole
thing. :)

Some searching turns up refurbished Gigaswitch modules.   Some are pretty cheap, but it looks like those are ATM ones, the FDDI ones I see quoted are more expensive.   Perhaps because FDDI was fairly successful at least for a short time, while ATM (as a LAN) was an utter failure.

The *only* thing I even needed it to do was bridge FDDI/FastEthernet so
it just ended up not being worth the effort.

It's not a small switch. :)

-brian