Re: [aclug-L] first plunge

["Greg House" <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>The 15 pin "joy stick" connector is actually an "AUI" connector.
>You buy an "AUI" adapter to interface with an existing network.
>National Comp. Resource has'em. They were very common back in thicknet
>days.


Yeah, but if I read his description of his connectors correctly, he doens't
need a tranceiver, since he already has a 10base2 (coax) connector & a
10baseT RJ45 (big phone jack) connector.

Phrostie, you have your pick of which direction to go at this point.  As
John suggested awhile back, since you have coax, I'd go ahead and go coax
for now, since the cards are cheap (about $10-20 for a decent one, and I've
seen 'em as low as $4 for a really slow old card).  The terminators & extra
connectors will cost you a lot less then a hub.

I'm no expert, but I'd be happy to draw you a picture, or show you a handful
of parts so you know what you're looking for. I have a bunch of stuff here
at the house preparing to install my little "training" network.

>On Sun, 20 Dec 1998, phrostie wrote:
>
>> like i said it has a SMC ULTRA chip set.
>> there are three connectors in the back.
>> top- looks like a big phone jack four connectors
>> middle- looks like a db15 connector
>> bottom- coax
>>
>> what else do i need to look for


There isn't much else!

>> for now i'm learning with two machines.
>> once i get it working i'm sure my wife will want a connection also.


If you're gonna do more then 2 machines, you're better off using the coax
'cause it's cheap.  You can get everything you need at National Computer,
but you'll pay quite a bit more for it then mail order.  One source of cheap
network cards is Comp Recycle (http://www.comp-recycle.com).  As stated in
the Ethernet HOWTO you probably want to avoid the 3Com 3c501s that they have
for $4.  Even though they're supported under Linux, they're supposed to be
very slow.  For what I'm doing (purely educational...) it's really all I
could invest in ($4 apiece!) since I wanted to learn to set up a router.
Using better cards would have cost me over at least $60 for parts, but I
ended up with about $25 in parts. I don't care how fast it is since I'm not
going to be using it for any real traffic.

Drop me mail off the list if you want to get together or something.

Greg

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