On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Lord Isildur wrote:

> how about a media converter or an fddi port on the switch? 

The switch already has an FDDI port on it...

The problem is this:  I've a 100BaseTX switch which I pipe my servers
into.  I also have a 24 port 10BT switch which my xterms, misc boxes,
etc... connect to.  The problem is that all ports on the switch are

1) 10BT (so I can't really put any bandwidth on the backplane), and
2) only support 1 mac address (it's meant for end distribution, and, okay,
it was free).

So the only way that I have to feed the 10BT switch is via it's integrated
FDDI port.  That'd be great, since I could throw 100mb from my 100BTX
ethernet switch into (via FDDI) the backplane of the 10BT switch.

Unfortunately, FDDI ain't just a media conversion.  I'd basically need a
router to do this.  I use media converters for all my other fiber
connections (like 10BaseFL or 10BaseFB - these are more hardware level
conversions - no actuall data translation occurs IIRC), but the FDDI
protocol is much more in depth than just a media/electrical/optical 
translation.

So, I'm trying to build an FDDI->100BTX box that'll do the job for me...

And the DEFPAs I've found are 1) expensive and 2) hard to find [sic] :-(

Thanks to all for the suggestions and notes!

-Jon