LinHES Forums
http://forum.linhes.org/

FDDI (fiber network)
http://forum.linhes.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=18322		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  mjl [ Mon May 19, 2008 3:31 pm ]
Post subject:  FDDI (fiber network)
Hi,

How would one go about building & loading drivers for a fiber network card? I see the fddi listed in the src headers.

Thanks
Mike
Author:  bobmyth [ Mon May 19, 2008 9:13 pm ]
Post subject: 
Is it PCI? I try lspci to find the PCI IDs and then start searching to find a driver that matches.
Author:  jimh [ Mon May 19, 2008 11:02 pm ]
Post subject:  FDDI or Fiber Ethernet?
First of all, are you sure you have a FDDI fiber interface, not just some form of a fiber Ethernet card? FDDI is rather rare these days.

If it is fiber Ethernet, there is a good chance that a driver that would work for a twisted pair version of the interface would work.
Author:  mjl [ Tue May 20, 2008 7:52 am ]
Post subject: 
Hi,

Thanks guys, I don't really know what exactly I am looking for as this is a new path for me. I figure that being fiber, it should really haul video files between boxes!

The cards I have are Interphase Corp 5526 Fibre Channel (pci) and going down the path of google it has led me to thinking it is fddi as a driver that is needed.

It doesn't clearly show in dmesg, but I think it is buried as a Tigon3 which shows as eth1. netcardconfig only shows eth3 & eth4 which work fine altho before I added the fiber, I think they were eth0 & eth1 which would indicate that something is recognized.

Then again, I may not be understanding what I am seeing, ain't the first time :)

Appreciate the words of wisdom!
Mike
Author:  Mephi [ Tue May 20, 2008 10:33 am ]
Post subject: 
Mike,

Fibre Channel and FDDI are two different networking technologies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre_Channel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fddi

How many cards do you have and what are they plugging into? One card on it's own is a bit useless :)

If it's this card:
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/network-cards/I/INTERPHASE-CORPORATION-Fiber-Channel-5526-PCI-FDDI.html

Then it's only 100Mb but it'll work over up to 200km of fibre...
Author:  mjl [ Tue May 20, 2008 1:55 pm ]
Post subject: 
Hi Mephi,

I understood there were differences between the two, just not the exact details.

I do have two of the cards which are several years old, goes back to about the transition time between the types, +/- 2000 era.

The connector shows a 1.25 gb (850 nm) so am again getting into trouble assuming ~125 mb transfer rate. The board shows H05526-008-A00 and comes from our Canadian friends.

Thanks for the tips and ideas, guess it is back to the library and dig into the books.
Mike
Author:  falinskip [ Wed May 28, 2008 7:28 pm ]
Post subject:  Past Experience with FDDI
Hi MJL,

It has been about 8 years since I tore out a FDDI backup network at my office. We were never able to get the speeds advertised out of it and it was much more problmatic than ethernet or ATM.

Also, it was a bear to troubleshoot when something went wrong!

You would be much better off using ethernet (which is much less expensive than FDDI). If you are looking for speed, try using Gigabit nicks and setting the MTU to 9000. When you hike up the packet size from 1500 to 9000 large file (in this case videos) are transmitted very well.

Good Luck,

Paul
Author:  mjl [ Wed May 28, 2008 9:44 pm ]
Post subject: 
Hi,

Your words of wisdom are much appreciated. I had not tried the larger packet loads but is certainly worthy of the experiment.

It just seemed that the glass connection would be a little better through put however that could be related to the packet size.

Thanks for the tip and will let you know how things work out.
Have a great day!
Mike
Author:  tjc [ Wed May 28, 2008 11:45 pm ]
Post subject: 
See my previously publish scripts for setting the MTU/MRU to 9000 here: http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12906&highlight=mtu+9000
Page 1 of 1 All times are UTC - 6 hours
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group
http://www.phpbb.com/