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From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: Novice LAN Questions
Message-ID: <1990Nov14.163334.16562@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 14 Nov 90 16:33:34 GMT
References: <1990Nov12.224549.24268@mccc.uucp>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 30

In article <1990Nov12.224549.24268@mccc.uucp> pjh@mccc.uucp (Pete Holsberg) writes:
>Our dean of administration has just given the OK to set up a LAN in our
>building for use by faculty and staff.  It would include about a dozen
>MSDOS PCs and would be used primarily for electronic mail and
>work-sharing among faculty and secretaries.  

>We have lots of unused twisted pairs in our telephone wiring.  Can we
>use them?  That would mean Ethernet, right?  Specifically, what hardware
>and software do we need?

I work with a system running AT&T's Starlan (the 1M version) over telephone
wiring with about 100 PC's plus several unix boxes on one net. The 10baseT
version should work also if you need more speed, but it wasn't available
when we set our sytem up.  The 1M version has a cost advantage, plus easier
wiring since you can just daisy-chain up to 10 units before you need
to connect into a hub.  The speed of the 1M version has been sufficient for
our needs (mostly word processing and email), although the number of units
would probably justify splitting into subnets with a 10M backbone.

>If the experiment works well, we will want to extend this to (a) other
>buildings, (b) UNIX computers, and (c) VAXen running VMS.  What
>hardware and software will we need then?

You can connect 3B2's and 386's in with the 1M starlan, but you would
probably need the 10-1 bridge or an ethernet card to connect to the
VAX, etc.  There is supposed to be software to allow TCP/IP to run
over the starlan links, but I don't have any experience with that.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us