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Does Anyone Still Use Token Ring?
blanchae asks: "Does anyone still use Token Ring, or is it dead? I remember hearing about 100 mbps TR a few years ago but nothing since. I remember that the strong point of TR over Ethernet was the QOS and the consistent response time. Does the banking community still use TR?"
This is the first time I see slashdot post with 0 comments; I guess it means something for tokenring's popularity :-).
100mbps version existed, but AFAIK tokenring is now extinct. Everyone is moving to wifi, anyway.
have a faster version of it. i liked token ring.
No.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
Deep down in what passes for their hearts, the banking "community" still uses hand-written ledgers with Monroe crank-powered adding machines.
I doubt anyone uses it anymore. By now all the token have surely been lost!
What possible advantages would using Token Ring wield? Even if it can go 100mbps now we do have 1000mbps ethernet. I think Token Ring should be buried.
Have you metaroderated recently?
No.
But thanks for asking.
I was involved in some of the gutting of the TR environments in the early 2000s from both of these banks. Pretty much everything at the user level is ethernet now.
The local IBM branch (which doesn't even exist today) threw out Token Ring before they went away. This says something.
No.
Token Ring is a great idea, in theory, but in the days of full-duplex GigE over Cat5e with 100 hosts on a segment, passing a token around is horribly inefficient, as well as pointless. We don't need it, so why use it? Old installations should have been replaced years ago, moved up to commodity ethernet hardware that everyone and their dog supports, for less than it costs to employ someone who knows about token ring.
You're thinking of HSTR - and no, no one really uses it anymore. In looking around I was amazed to see that the working group even thought far enough ahead to start planning a gigabit spec. I havent seen a concentrator/MAU (right word?) in years, though. Any QoS features that were implemented in Token Ring are pretty much duplicated in 802.1p and other (proprietary) layer 2 QoS/CoS protocols.
Rings themselves are still used, just in other topologies. You may still see some FDDI here and there, and many cable companies use RPR/DTP/SRP to deliver digital cable and broadband access at the same time in their cores.
Either way, I'm sure the pointy haired boss doesn't miss it.
i use token ring...in my pants
IBM had an ad campiagn "6 is greater than 10" or some crap, they bought and drank their own kool-aid - In reality, faster, cheaper and easier to deploy was the real winner. Appletalk also had theoretically higher throughput at high traffic levels due to slight differences in collision management algos.
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There is clearly a lot of research going on, with results published, as in Raja's Optimal bandwidth utilization in wireless token ring networks released earlier this year. However, 1998 was the last big year for user's guides, which indicates that this technology has long since fallen from the mainstream and now survives only in academia.
About 5 years ago, I worked for a trucking company that was very heavily invested in token ring and would not consider switching to ethernet, no matter how compelling the argument was at that time. I can only imagine it's harder to justify staying on TR now, but it can't be cheap.
Its only advantage was that it could run at much higher utilization than ethernet without your network choking - we would see times where a ring would be running at 75% and that was no problem.
However, it was a real problem from a financial and operational standpoint. When we bought new PC's, we would rip out the ethernet cards and install Olicom TR cards we paid $180 each for - we got a good deal because we bought hundreds of them. Server-class cards were more - a lot more.
And we did get the 100Mb token ring switches, which was truly one of the more absurd things I have ever seen IT money spent on. I still don't have a clear idea how this was a good thing: you got a 100Mb token ring switch, which would create a ring on each port. Then you could plug exactly one device into each port, as long as it had a 100Mb token ring adapter. This was 5 years ago, and I remember that per port, it was price-competitive with Gig-E fiber.
Then there are the usual entertaining issues with drivers and growing the network. Need an extra PC at your desk? You can't just plug a hub in and go - you have to pull another cable from the wiring closet. You need certified drivers for your Windows cluster? How about a touch-screen network device for your truck terminals? A firewall? A NAS? No, you can't have any of those.
I know there are plenty of people who will swear by TR. You'll find the evolved version of this technology in FDDI rings - and it makes a lot of sense and works very well in that application. But as a LAN for your company, it sucks ass...technically, the concept is sound but nobody is developing it further and it takes a lot more specialized knowledge and maintenance overhead than ethernet. And every year that goes by makes it much more expensive to keep it than to switch to ethernet.
I turned down a job 3 years ago at a place that was still running TR - a mid-sized retail chain. They said they were starting to look in to ethernet, but were happy with their token rings. That was the deciding factor for me to keep looking...At this point, a company that isn't actively working to replace TR with something else has some serious management issues and I would wonder what else was lying inder the surface.
So if you can find a few cards and a MAU somewhere, experiment with it at home. But avoid it like the plague in a business setting. That's just my $.02 anyway.
yes. I still know people who use it. Had lots of problems back when win2k was released with bugs in their network code for Token Ring.
Washington Mutual used token-ring networks in most of their branches until 2003. I was a bank teller when they upgraded from OS/2 Warp machines on a Token-ring to Windows XP on Ethernet.
Still have a few mainframes that have the management devices on a ring. Fortunately, they also
support ethernet, so we use it. I still have the 4-port TR card in my 7500 router. And if I dig around
I'm sure to find a MAU somewhere.
Nope, banks use ip over ethernet, and atm over fiber. Backbone to ATM (well remote atms can be dialup, isdn, or frame), its all modern (or reasonably so).
I've seen token ring in some banks but only old jacks(I work in the industry).
The only place I've seen it used still is in the retail (POS) market, IBM calls it store loop though, and its even slower(kbps IIRC). Most of those places are scraping to get rid of it, not nessisarily for any reason other than its easy to drop the whole network(wires are aged, stupid clerks, etc.), and expensive to negate that problem with one of those relay doo-dads.
Mostly, IMHO, anyone that still uses it wants it gone. Its dead jim.
A couple of years ago, I worked for a contractor that was switching out several floors of networking gear for Wachovia. They were moving from Token Ring to Ethernet. Of course, the real fun was that they had a seemingly random mix of Windows 95, NT, and (for the lucky few who got to work on those machines) Windows 2000 that we had to change network cards in.
So, that's at least one bank that was switching their network (they might have already been standardized as Ethernet, it was an office they got after purchasing First Union).
I experienced P2P token ring back in college. Here's how it worked: a group of peers arranged in a circular manner would pass around a named pipe. Each peer would hit the pipe, a process known as token. After a while, the pipe would be cached, and a designated peer reloaded the pipe.
I worked at a Rubbermaid plant that still had Token Ring, FDDI, 10Base2, and some 10MB Ethernet. I eliminated all of these technologies.
when you are using a shared bandwidth. In the days of hubs w/o switches, it was appreciably more effecient. However, in today's world of a switch on every port, it just doesn't matter. An interesting example of its use would have been for wireless networking -- but people were already used to 802.11.
I used to use token ring, but I was never very good at it. I was always fucking up the rotation.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
Phillip Morris had the largest Macintosh TR network until around 95ish. They dumped token ring even before they ended up dumping macs.
Banks, I still used to see OS/2 based ATMs and stuff until '99. You could go in, and see it on the backs of desktop machines in the lobby too, until right around then. I've not seen anything but windows and ethernet since, though.
One of my sparcstations has token ring. A few of the macs have it. And I have one in my main linux server too... but ifconfig up'ing it is asking for the thing to crash.
I see token ring still in use in bank branches, main bank data processing centres, and some insurance companies. NATO is rumoured to have a bunch of legacy systems on TR. On the PC side, its mostly old ISA cards, and the 486-PII era machines which still have some crappy 32x0 emulator running in fullscreen mode on OS/2. On the the mainframe side, there are still old IBM 3080s+3090s, system 36/37/38s and many C390s around. Be afraid, be very afraid.
One of the side effects of some companies locked into dino^H^H^H^Hlegac^H^H^H^Htime tested solutions, is that they have to pay whatever it takes for dino^H^H^H^Hexperienced old-fa^H^Htimers to come in and fix the fsckups caused by young ignoramuses not having any knowledge of TR. My going rate right now is EUR400/hour, with a minimum of an 8 hour payment up front before I even set foot on the premises, and I still get called out about 3 times per year. get off my lawn...
Cisco must still have TR, I met a dejected CCIE candidate who told me he paid many thousands of euros for a one week CCIE-mill course, which took him from windoze point and click to supposedly a CCIE, only to have half his stack be wired with TR which the fly-by-night company had never heard of. Clearly the CCIE proctors have some tricks up their sleeves when they detect a candidate who has all the answers but none of the experience.
the AC
As well, my cisco study kit still has some 2513s and AGS+s and a box of TR cables (hermaphrodite and RJ45), ISA cards, and some 8228s. I haven't touched any of it in at least 5 years
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Although we discuss it some in the networking class at my school, only one person I know uses TokenRing (and they use it at home on legacy machines, not for performance but for nostalgia purposes). Interestingly, they also use BNC-coax cabling for their TR.
IEEE has a 1 Gbit/s token ring standard.
When working with Cisco switches, it sometimes comes up under some option along with FDDI. FDDI is like TK on steroids. Double-direction fiber in a ring with a token to talk. I know more people still use FDDI than TK.
I had a one-day job last year where I helped a financial company upgrade from Token Ring to Ethernet. It was a bit shocking see all these relatively new machines with built-in Ethernet using Token Ring adapter boards. Even more surprising that the company just recently moved into the building a year before had it wired for Token Ring even though it was already wired for Ethernet.
;)
The worst part of the job was cleaning up after the two junior technicians who plugged the Ethernet cable into the Token Ring adapter board instead of the Ethernet port. For all 90 machines. They then wondered why I got more respect from the project leader. I kept telling them to get their certifications.
The power stations have had IT infrastructure for years (probably 5+ years more than the average office, after networking kit for nuclear and safety related stuff I should think), and the kit installed at the time would have been possibly the fastest available. Upgrading doesn't happen because of the way the operation is run: Everything is long term plans to be implemented for as close to as forever is, and if a system works then changing things just presents too much risk to the day to day running of the rest of the plant. So 16Mbps token ring it is...
Car analogies break down.
...we used to set up a Tokin' Ring for social networking.
BSA: "Would you like a free Software Audit"? me: "No, thanks. My software is all Free".
Probably no NEW installations. If someone got ahold of a large building that already had token ring installed, and it would be horribly expensive to replace, then they probably still have token. When I was in college, they were gutting a few buildings that had token ring still. This is about 1998-99 era, at UCF.
At some point it just becomes too expensive to maintain and replace/repair, and that high cost of installation for a switch to ethernet looks better and better.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
From [[Token ring]]:
Madge Networks, a one time competitor to IBM, is now considered to be the market leader in Token Ring.
From [[Madge Networks]]:
Madge Networks NV. was a global leader and pioneer of high speed networking solutions in the mid 1990s. The company was founded by Robert Madge.
The company filed for bankruptcy in April 2003.
Granted, they still exist, and sell stuff, but for a market monopoly to file for bankruptcy...can't be too many customers left, can there?
Worst. Ask Slashdot. Ever.
-William Brendel
No, no one uses it anymore. Not since the close of the Third Age, when it was destroyed by a Halfling in the fires of Mount Doom.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Ethernet's big thing is that it uses CSMA instead of passing a token around. It seems dumb at first (and is!), until you realize all the things that can go wrong with token ring, and some of the other logistics of it.
:)
Ethernet won't work so well for a bus layout, but it works great for a star layout. Token ring is supposed to be awesome on a bus layout, because of how it manages access to the network resources, but it's not something that's better in reality (only in theory).
Plus, as devices scale up, the simpler (and thus cheaper and easier to design) ethernet go there first. Token ring just is not efficient from a cost perspective. We don't use token ring for the same reason we don't use RISC machines -- money and economies of scale
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
does anyone still make them?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I work for a bank... a LARGE bank.
I know we have one small location that still has TR because the site has been on the chopping block for 4 years.
(It's finally closing this year.)
I know we stopped installing it in new locations about 10 years ago in favor of Ethernet. My site (and most of the rest of the bank) was upgraded from TR to Ethernet(100Mb) about 5 years ago.
Banks and any other large companies are going to stick to industry standards in order to reduce costs and complexity. I know we've had a hell of a time finding replacement hardware for the switching/routing equipment in that last TR location. My point is, why should a large company build a custom LAN network when the cheaper, easier technology will do just fine. e.g. We would have to disable the ethernet adapter in the Dell workstations we use and install TR cards. I have a laptop...I'd have to find a PCMCIA TR card. This is exactly the type of BS that large companies don't want to deal with.
Here's the real reason TR is dead: QOS was only an issue with Ethernet when you had people using hubs. Now that massive switches are the norm, it isn't an issue since each user can run in full duplex. If you're on a hub, you're sharing bandwidth. If you're on a switch, you've got 100Mb all to yourself. (Unlike a hub, the switch can buffer the frames if the destination port is busy.) In addition, you can run in duplex which means your ethernet card can send and receive at the same time. If your office is using a switch, it's your WAN connections you have to worry about, not your LAN.
And thats just for the cube farm. For the server room we have either dual 100Mb or dual 1000Mb connections to multiple backbones (more for redundancy than bandwidth.) There are also dedicated fiber going to SANS drives.
The computer in my cube is piggy-backed onto a Cisco IP phone, which all goes to a single 100Mb switch port. I have never had a problem with it.
Token Ring is DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
We run a Development shop, and are still required to run SNA and IP over TR. Not many connections left, thank heavens. Good ole Cisco 3920's. Switched TR was a savior. Passed up 100Mb for Lent, though. One now wonders if the new zX boxes from IBM will even have a TR adaptor.
Long after the story post, and not a single reply...
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
Wow, I remember in the 1980s, I used to have corporate customers that would order 250 token ring cards at a time. Unfortunately, IBM couldn't deliver. They're probably still on backorder.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
int token_ring=bsd;
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
I believe my company still uses some token ring cabling to carry ethernet. You have to put this funny adapter on the end (at each end) and then the token ring cable will carry ethernet. It cant go any faster than 100Mbps though. I think they are supposed to replace it next year when a large part of the company moves buildings.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I have a friend who inherited a working install between a bunch of OLD wireless access points for an inventory system. He has converted everything else over to the Ether Bunny, but his management is not in the mood to put in and replace a bunch of RF equipment.
It is funny this came up. I submitted this as an article just today, but it was rejected (grouse, grouse). Anyway, it lists Token Ring as one of the top flops of IT in the last 20 years. I have actually never used a token ring network, but this is stuff I always thought about it when I read about it:
Network World's editors and columnist have nominated their favorite
IT flops of the last 20 years, making for an interesting and entertaining read. Among the flops are the OSI protocol and technologies such as ATM and Token Ring, but also making the list IBM, Microsoft's Bob and ME, and the Apple Newton.
Ron Paul
I don't think anyone has seen the Token ring since that hobbit lobbed it into the volcano a few years ago.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Token Ring was a good tech for the time (until the early 90's), but switched Ethernet killed Token Ring. Later there was faster switched Token Ring as well, but by that time Ethernet was so cheap Token Ring no longer made sense to implement. It was cheaper to replace existing infrastructures with inexpensive Ethernet than to upgrade the old Token Ring networks. You know, you could have almost the same conversation about ATM. s/token ring/atm/g
I doubt it. The one problem with Token Ring was that, while in theory it was supposed to protect against packet collisions, it ended up having many packet collisions due to poorly conceptualized and poorly created hardware. Even if it did reach 100mbps, it would have been dated in comparison to highly refined demand-priority system used later on. Even if a bank does use Token Ring, it would be hard for them to find an engineer who is 1) able to properly troubleshoot it and 2) not retired (I could be wrong with the last one. Please correct me if I am. I have no idea as to how many modern network engineers know how to maintain Token Ring).
Most banks, like every other modern corporate environment, are using the familiar arrangement of switches with a router.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
The big deal with token ring was that the network would remain stable under 100% load. Classic 10mbps ethernet with hubs would start experiencing trouble around 60% load and collapse by the time load reached 90%. If you had a big, flat network it just plain wouldn't work.
Look at why: With token ring, only the card holding the token could transmit. Everybody else had to wait for the token. So each station would empty its transmit queue and then pass the token on to the next station. On ethernet, a station would send a packet whenever and if another station sent a packet at about the same time they'd collide. Every station observing the collision would assert a collision signal and after the collision signal cleared the two stations that transmitted would wait a random period of time and then retransmit. That's oversimplifying a bit but more or less correct.
So, token ring was much more stable in a large LAN with a high probability of multiple stations having outbound traffic ready at the same time.
Now, along comes 100baseTX on cat5, the end of coaxial ethernet and the proliferation of $50 switches. When you're plugged in to a switch there are only two devices in the collision domain: you and the switch. So, lots less collisions. When you're in full duplex mode (as you generally are), collisions are impossible since by definition both sides are allowed to transmit at the same time. Now your ethernet network remains stable at 100% utilization. And if the nic in the PC burns out, the rest of the network doesn't care.
Token ring is very sensitive to malfunctioning nics. A malfunctioning nic may drop the token, that is it may receive the token and then fail to transmit it to the next nic. That kills a token ring network dead until the admin wanders around with an analyzer and figures out which PC is at fault.
Suddenly the tables were turned. Token ring was an administrative headache and expensive to boot. Ethernet was simple, cheap and worked just as well.
Token ring died out except as an academic curiosity -- an interesting early answer to a problem that was eventually solved another way.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I work at a major teaching hospital in Northern Ohio and we still have sections of the campus that are still going strong on token ring. Granted, we're moving away from it but... it's still alive. And taking care of patients.
- John
Did you really need to ask that in order for it to be answered?
still critical systems such as a nuclear power plant etc use token ring as performance, time , and other factors can be guaranteed where as on an Ethernet there is no guarantee that a node will be able to transmit data within a given time frame.. but of course this can be overcome by connecting each node to a Ethernet switch to get rid of collisions..
Posting three Ask Slashdots in a row while the database was "under maintenance"... is this Slashdot's way of saying FUD, or what?
I work at the helpdesk for a large retail enterprise and one of the chains we owned (until recently) still uses ancient IBM cash registers over Token Ring networks. Fortunately, we just agreed to sell that chain a month or two ago, and the new owner is quickly replacing the horrible POS's with semi-modern technology. After another week I won't have to support them anymore. TR is finally dead in my company!
This becomes a moot issue when you can obtain a 24-port gigabit switch with an internal 48 gbps fabric for less than $200. CSMA vs. token passing is irrelevant since all packets are handled and queued on dedicated links.
If every port isn't directly switched on your network, then someone fucked up. There's just no excuse.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Actually, yes token ring is still in use, and in the banking industry. It isn't used any more in the access or distribution layers of these networks, mainly for two reasons. The first is that it is too slow for distribution, and the second is that the vendors who made the TR gear (e.g. Nortel/Bay, Cisco, etc) don't support TR gear any more. There was a 100Mbps TR made, but I believe it was a proprietary standard and the equipment was mainly made by Madge. FDDI/CDDI and 100VG-AnyLAN were both 100Mbps protocols that were more or less deterministic if you really needed tight latency control.
Where TR is still used is actually in the cores of some of their networks carrying SNA/mainframe traffic. Rings were put in years ago and are still working fine; banks have pulled out lots of their old TR hubs and so have plenty of spares in case the equipment dies. While yes, mainframes can now use OSA GigE adapters, some banks still have FEPs and Mainframes and run DLSw out to the edges of their network. The FEPs all talk to the routers on TR rings and everything works swimmingly. At 16Mbps, you actually have tons of bandwidth for text-based banking app mainframe stuff. And before it went out of fashion, a lot of vendors made TR switches (e.g. Nortel's Centillion 20 or its TokenSpeed switch blade for its Centillion 50/100/5000BH chassis).
Disrupting these rings is a tons of work, and replacing them newer technologies costs money. They're being replaced, but slowly...
http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22wireless%20toke n%20ring%22
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I've worked for several insurance/investement companies, and everyone switched from a Token Ring to Ethernet. I can think of several reasons. The first one is cost. The ethernet equipment is cheaper. The second is management. With ethernet hubs, you get all the management capabilities you need and none of the disadvantages of the token-ring (e.g.,. situation with the 'lost token'. The 3rd: ethernet switching is predominant (vs collision based classical ethernet), so you have a constaant response time as well. The 4th: token-ring based bridging protocol is a bitch to manage/integrated with ethernet and TCP/IP.
That does not mean that a token-ring based protocols are dead. A ring configuration is still a viable option, say, to connect multiple routers over large distances, say 50-100 km. But as a LAN, token ring is pretty much dead.
An interesting titbit. I was working for IBM at that time (a few years ago, around 2000), a highly confidential message came from the top: "IBM is migrating internally from Token-Ring to Ethernet.". And then I knew Token-Ring was *really* dead.
That franchise is played out. Old news. Last year. Passé. If they could have worked out the rights to The Hobbit in time for Christmas 2005, then maybe there'd be time for one final she-bang, and perhaps a TV spinoff or two - but by now people've moved on to World of Lovecraft.
However, LAN: A Dog - now that's a book I can identify with.
Well, we are using a book in my electronics course that teaches about computers. The book was revised in 2005. 90% of the networking chapter refers to token ring networks, and makes us learn about mesh, hybrid, and ring topology. It states how ethernet networks are not commonly used due to frequent collisions. It also refers to infrared networking as an efficient means of communication. In the operating systems section, it teaches us that while reformating a computer, just use FAT16 if in doubt of a fs to use, just so you know it will work.
High quality material they are teaching in high schools these days eh.
I can't help but share an experience from an old job.
It was this shop that basically bought and refurbished 2-year old PCs and sold them to people who didn't need a buttload of computing power. Internet surfing, e-mail, and word processing is basically all these people needed. The owner bought a load that had token ring cards in it. As he pulled one out and replaced it with an ethernet card, he exclaimed "Uuugh. Token ring. I feel dirty." This was five years ago.
People still use token ring? Of course. Many people still use token ring? Hell no.
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
I've had one customer for whom token ring on Shielded Twisted Pair wiring was the right choice even after Cat5 Ethernet cards were cheap - they had lots of Big Electrical Equipment, and the alternative would have been to do fiber, which was cost-prohibitive back then, plus they didn't really need high data rates.
Performance differences weren't really all that significant for the different technologies, except for obvious base-rate differences (100 Mbps >> 16 Mbps > 10 Mbps > 4 Mbps.) Even if they were, Full-Duplex Ethernet (which is pretty much universal these days if you use switches instead of hubs) doesn't have the same issues that half-duplex does.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hey, there're two canonical jokes about token rings, so we might as well cover them both up front. Pass me the pipeweed, dude....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... do you expect me and Jayna to transform into the shape of an eagle. Huh!
I work in a video store, we are running Dumb terminals in a Tolken ring Topology, that connects to the Internet on X10... There are 8 stores with 4 terminals each, plus one main frame. The terminals we use are OLD (like the same age as me 25) and they are wired to a MUX that has the abity to work with 8 Different Devices!!!
But the DAMN things are SLOW, and they are very tempermental (i.e. to fix them, we normally just replace the guns, and if a terminal is not working, we just switch it's location on the MUX, but that only makes it work everyonce in a while.)
To top it off though, the stupid planner for the small network placed all of the cables under a pallet below the counter area, the pallet is Affixed to the floor, and has NO removable Panels to allow for the changing of the cables. So even though I know one of the cables is grounding at times (hince the need to change the terminals everyonce in a while since it stops working), I couldn't even convince them to replace it without requireing a remodel.
Please, don't weep for those computers, weep for us workers who have to work in a System 5 system that is run by a IT "pro" (the quotes are to signify that he thinks he can do it) who can't bother to look at how to update the system while we are friggin' closed.
WTF, it is UNIX, you can at the very least make a script to update your files! I mean I have mentioned certain commands that I can reccomend to help his tasks, but he has no clue what they are, when I was talking about cat, he had no clue what it was used for!?!?!?!?
Wait... I work at Sears, and I think I know what you guys are talking about! We have these aincent IBM cash registers in the Product Services department that hook up with coaxial in the back. I'm no serious tech guy, but I always knew they were something old and different when I saw the server in the back room.
Everyone is moving to wifi, anyway.
NO!! That's way to general of an assumption and is just wrong. It's like saying everyone is deploying CAT5e, or everyone is deploying fiber. I would say it is a mix of the three, cat5e for Ethernet (up to 10Gbe soon!), fiber for higher speed or longer run needs, and wifi where needed. How ever, we have setup a lot of networks and the vast majority of people (businesses any way) and still deploying CAT5e. Wireless is just nerver going to be fast enough, secure enough, and reliable enough to push copper and fiber out of the picture. So no, everyone isn't moving to wifi, they are deploying it along side copper and fiber but in a more limitied capacity and only where nessecary. Wired links are still better in most cases and this is what we promote to customers.
i didnt realize that there were many stoner geeks like myself
:)
Are you kidding? There are LOTS of us! Most of the better h4x0r types I know, people who actually know their shit and have professional IT jobs, are metal head stoners. Shit, pump me full of caffine and thc and I am a hard core coding machine!!
People who stereotype stoners as being stupid are extremely ignorant. I can design and build things when I am baked that your average person wouldn't be able to fully comprehend in their entire life time...
I'd be willing to bet Sears is still using token ring networks in their stores; they were about 5 years ago and I haven't seen their POS terminals change since then...
A small shop unit opened up on our campus last year selling cheap laptops, mobile phones etc etc. Legend has it that a fresher wandered in to get a network card for his PC to connect to his residence room network point and was sold a token ring card. The legend does not tell if it was ISA or S-BUS, or what the newbie did to his motherboard to connect it. But doubtless the tale will grow in the telling...
I'm not from the banking community but this high-speed modem is intolerably slow. I'm interested in upgrading my twenty eight point eight kilo-baud internet connection to a one point five megabit fibre-optic T-1 line. Will someone be able to provide an IP router that's compatible with my token ring ethernet LAN configuration?
Myself and my wife work for IBM. One of my wife's first jobs at IBM was writing Token Ring drivers for early iterations of the NDIS interface. She had to write all the code on a 3270 terminal connected to a mainframe and cross-compile to the PC because the PC's couldn't handle the code. I joined the company two months before the Networking Hardware Division (which made Token Ring cards, ATM switches, Ethernet switches, mainframe communication devices, and Multiprotocol Routers) was paid $2B by Cisco to go out of business.
The Token Ring products were withdrawn from marketing a couple of years ago, so no more MAU's and Concentrators or NICs can be purchased, at least not from IBM. However, the products are still supported, and not uncommon in mainframe installations.
At IBM we finished the Ethernet migration a couple of years ago. The thing that struck me the most about the migration was how converting from 14Mbps TR cable to 100Mbps Ethernet cable involved nothing more than inserting an adapter cube into the connector on each end of the building cabling. One of the primary features of the "IBM Cabling System" was that it could be adapted to many different cable types by just using adapters; coax, twinax, UTP, etc. To accomplish this feat, it was actually shielded, as opposed to unshielded CAT3/5, etc. This made it hideously over-specc'd for the original common use of TR. The cabling was designed so you could run it past just about anything and not have to worry about interference, cross-talk, etc. You could even get cable that had some UTP pairs stuffed between the shielding and the sheath so you could run your phone and data cabling using the same cable run.
The drawback was that the cabling was bulky, expensive, and difficult to work with.
Making cable that will actually work at over six times it's origninal intended speed while being more than a bit difficult to work with is an interesting example of Enterprise-quality engineering philosophy at IBM from the '80s.
SirWired
oh wait, that's a Tolkien ring
Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do!
Check out http://www.ether2.com/ for a technology that uses ethernet but avoids using switches at all. They seem to try to deal with collisions by each station learning and knowing when it is ok to send. They claim to get much higher utilization and latency that scales down as bandwidth scales up. While not token ring; it is one of the few new switchless technologies I know of in networking.
-Ack
-- soldack
Beat this.
The company I worked at for a year during my industry placement had a combination of standard 100Mb ethernet, and Decnet. Yes, I kid you not, Decnet. There was a MicroVAX in the server room with a ton of parallel lines coming out of the board which snaked off to the desks of various engineers (as in metal) who had dumb terminals wired up to them. Yes, with greenscreens.
It gets worse. By some horrible horrible technical voodoo, the MicroVAX was connected (by a single TR system) to the main company ethernet switch, and was visable to machines running Pathworks as a node in a workgroup on the Windows network. Except sometimes it wasn't. It was all a bit hit and miss. And this was a mission critical peice of equipment.
Decnet over Ethernet via Token Ring. Arrrrrrrgh!
(..to the tune of "Particle Man")
Token Ring LAN, Token Ring LAN
Doing the things a token ring can
How does it work?
It's not important
Token Ring LAN
Is it a drag or is it a waste?
When it's installed
Does it get replaced?
Or does that admin get axed instead?
Nobody cares
Token Ring LAN
Ethernet LAN, Ethernet LAN
Ethernet LAN hates Token Ring LAN
They have a fight
Ethernet wins
Ethernet LAN
Internet WAN, Internet WAN
Size of the entire Internet, man
Usually kind to the smaller LAN
Internet WAN
It's got a link with PPP band,
A T1 band, and an OC3 band
And when they're together it's a happy LAN
Powerful WAN, Internet WAN
Workgroups LAN, Workgroups LAN
Formerly known as MS LANMAN
Lives its life in a garbage can
Workgroups LAN
Is it depressed or is it a mess?
Does it feel totally worthless?
Who came up with Workgroups LAN?
Degraded LAN, Workgroups LAN
Ethernet LAN, Ethernet LAN
Ethernet LAN hates Token Ring LAN
They have a fight
Ethernet wins
Ethernet LAN
Wireless NEVER works RELIABLY.
Even the furthest channels, 1 and 12 interfere with each other, The connection, even at 54 MBPS.....or so they call it, you only get a MAX throughput of 30, more likely 20 MBPS half-duplex.
Some new crazy cards try to make full duplex and stuff but, since all the channels interfere it's not really worth it's title.
Wireless should be saved for portable devices and Should NEVER replace a good copper/fibre line.
Token Ring is deterministic, which means that it is possible to calculate the maximum time that will pass before any end station will be capable of transmitting, something that can only be approximated with Ethernet. In a manufacturing environment using robotics and precise timing requirements such as stamping operations on a conveyor belt, Token Ring is still being used. Token Ring does not have collisions, eliminating most retransmissions that are common in half duplex ethernet, which will also cause a delay.
For most purposes, Token Ring is no longer needed, but in manufacturing or other industries with precise timing requirements Token Ring is still very much in use.
IBM Hursley Labs in the UK were still using 16mbps token ring in late 2002, although they had CAT6 ethernet wiring in place. I expect they would have changed over by now.
Instructor of a UNIX class I took about 10 years ago worked at Random House in IT. He took us on a tour of the facility. Back then they were using Token Ring, don't know if that's still the case.
I have two TR switches on my desk now and piles of NICs. Theyre not being used and will end up on ebay soon. I dont expect to get much from selling them.
I've HEARD of banks using them, but all the banks I've visited use Dell or IBM PC workstations with AIX or AS/400 servers using 100mbit ethernet. TR died for the same reasons ATM died for smaller locations... its way to complex to make. An ethernet hub is $10 and a gigabit ethernet hub is under $50. Theyre also well standardized compared to TR and others... say your computer has a TR nic. What will you connect it to? Almost all new laptops have built-in ethernet nic. For a TR you have to buy the card and do the driver dance.
TR is great, ATM is great, FDDI is great, and once upon a time arcnet was useful (still have the passive hubs here). But if you dont want ANY headaches, just use ethernet.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The powerplant in PA that nearly destroyed the known universe. (Yes I know it wasn't all that bad, but no matter what I put there someone would have tried to correct me.)
t -sheets/3mile-isle.html
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fac
When they tried to upgrade to faster connections they had some failure controling the reactor. Not sure exactly, but it was explained to me that the control rod motors need slight adjustments to keep the reactor "in balance". the faster connections caused more samples to be processed than the adjustment motors could keep up with.
Take this with a big grain of salt. I believe the person who told me believed it, and he used to work at TMI, but not sure where he got his info. Whatever..
Sit... Speak.... Shake.... Good Dog!
In theory, Ethernet on coax should be stable under heavy load. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn't, due to defective design of some widely used interface chips. Here's the actual story. See this note by Wes Irish at Xerox PARC
The worst device was the SEEQ 8003 chip, found in some Cisco and SGI devices. Due to an error in the design of its hardware state machine, it would turn on its transmitter for a few nanoseconds in the middle of an interframe gap. This noise caused other machines on the LAN to restart their interframe gap timers and ignore the next packet, if it followed closely enough. This happened even if the SEEQ chip was neither the sender or the receiver of the packets involved. So as soon as you plugged one of these things into a LAN, throughput went down, even if it wasn't doing anything. A network analyzer wouldn't even see the false collision; this was at too low a level.
This was tough to find. Wes Irish worked on the problem by arranging for both ends of Xerox PARC's main coax LAN to terminate in one office. Then he hooked up a LeCroy digital oscilloscope to both ends. Then he tapped into a machine with an Ethernet controller to bring out a signal when the problem was detected and trigger the oscilloscope. Then, when the problem occured, he had a copy of the entire packet as an analog waveform stored in the scope. This could then be printed with a thermal printer and gone over by hand.
Because he had the same signal from both ends of the wire, the wierd SEEQ interference mentioned above appeared time-shifted due to speed of light lag, making it clear that the interference was from a different node than the one that was supposed to be sending. You could measure the time shift and figure out from where on the cable the noise was being inserted. Which he did.
It took some convincing to get manufacturers to admit there was a problem. It helped that Wes was at Xerox PARC, where Ethernet was born. I went up there to see his work, and once I saw the waveforms, I was convinced. There was much faxing of waveform printouts for a few months, and some vendors were rather unhappy, but the problem got fixed.
So that's why.
It's still heavily used in IBM Argentina.
Once you start demanding virtual-circuit type services over an interface like ethernet (CSMA/CD), you'll want better support at lower levels for quality of service and the like. I don't see it as a kludge so much as an alternate way of handling things. ATM handles mixed traffic type fairly well, with mixed streams of voice and IP traffic going through backbones everywhere.
I don't think TDMA/CDMA/etc and token ring are really super close in design, although some elements are similar.
The big issues are that LANs are point-to-point. That means CSMA/CD works fine. For shared-mediums (anything radio), you'll want TDMA/CDMA/etc to help control regular access to the medium, and minimize the negative effects of over subscription (and also why WiMax rules).
As for QoS, that's a matter of keeping within your boundaries of a network. With Ethernet, hitting the ceiling means the end of your traffic -- unless you do selective traffic control (TCP's congest control right now is stupid, and UDP -- used for VOIP -- doesn't respect it all) via another protocol.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Frodo used the Tolkien Ring a few times the past few years. It's still alive.
It was mentioned in a networking class I took that token ring is used in aircraft due to their predictability. So by extension, any real-time system would be a good candidate for a token ring setup. It lets you prove that you have adequate bandwidth for the situation. Ethernet is at heart still random, no matter how much bandwidth you have.
They were hiring and of course we went down in what they had etc.
The company still had a big IBM mainframe running batches that people had to fill from a green CRT. They still used Token Ring in their machine environment, just because they didn't change it since it works great. They are thinking about decentralizing for security reasons though.
I heard different researches still use them as you can calculate the latency and round-trip and for some tests that is really important.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Its supposed to be gigabit wireless, So it takes care of your Gigabit Token Ring (GTR). And really, What's the point? Seriously, if you can't secure wireless, then you shouldn't be messing with ANY type of network.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Real men don't use cable you can coil... That's why I stick with good old 10B5 thick ethernet.
I misread the title and thought we were going to be talking about "The Lord of the Rings"
Back to the topic though, Token ring is so old, they should throw it into the volcano.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I believe Royal Bank of Canada still uses Token Ring. They have rolled out new computer systems to many branches, and the one I was in recently had new computers at the teller's counters which appeared to have Token Ring addresses on the info-stickies (system serial number, helpdesk phone number, etc) stuck to the monitors.
I used to use TR for a long time and it worked great. Then the wire broke, the token fell out of the ethernet and rolled under a heavy cabinet. Never did find the stupid token and upgraded to fiber.
sudo eat my shorts
Yep. Two floors in my firm's corporate HQ are still on tokenring.
Dilbert's boss still uses token ring, but he lost the token somewhere in the ethernet.
Last I saw a TR network was at a job for an insurance company in 1998. They were beginning the process of replacing it with ethernet just as I left. They were still on Novell, too.
Token ring to rule them all
Token ring to bind them
Token ring to bring them all
And in the....... (connection lost)
Oops. Guess the MAU went down again.
Yes, there's still at least one person who uses Token Ring--me. I'm one of those folks who can't bear to see anything even remotely useful be tossed out...and as such, I have collected a ton of very high end token ring equipment over the years. Until recently, the stuff sat around, waiting for me to find a way to link it with my existing Ethernet stuff. I twiddled with routing between networks, but didn't like how it turned out. And then I found an IBM 8229 LAN bridge with one Ethernet board and one single-interface TR board...plugged it in...and suddenly two worlds were united seamlessly. Almost every new node on my network has been on the token ring side. Just recently I put in a second bridge (made from a PS/2 Model 50 and the IBM TR bridge program from the early 90s) to link the 16Mbit ring with a 4Mbit ring for my vintage computer stuff. I think State Farm Insurance used token ring for a while. Whether or not they still do, I couldn't say. However, I once worked cleaning up computers that they donated to schools and other educational institutions. 90% of them had Olicom 16/4 PCI TR cards in place. Despite having some "ICS to RJ45" converter plugs that say "100" on them, I've never seen any 100 megabit TR gear.
One of our clients insisted on installing a Token Ring MAU which our servers would use to talk to their mainframe using a proprietary IBM layer-3 protocol. The mainframe didn't support IP at the time (2001).
Did you know that, if token ring cards get disconnected, you have to reboot the host machine to get the link back? True for both Windows and HP-UX servers, so I assume it's something monumentally stupid in the cards themselves.
Pavlov's Dog ate the bell, and now he's barking at Schroedinger's cat all the time... -Me
https://utdirect.utexas.edu/loreg/sems.WBX?year_se mester=99999
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[insert funny
I don't know if anyone is still using Token rings but I damn well have to write assignments on the technology. I disccussed this with my lecturer and wrote in a paragraph explaining how out-of-date the technology was in current markets.