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Date:      Sat, 27 Sep 1997 09:16:17 -0400 (EDT)
From:      "David E. Cross" <dec@phoenix.its.rpi.edu>
To:        sthaug@nethelp.no
Cc:        tlambert@primenet.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 'fxp' driver/hardware lossage (was Re: Alexander B. Povol's mail)
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.970927091018.16019C-100000@phoenix.its.rpi.edu>
In-Reply-To: <17057.875363985@verdi.nethelp.no>

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On Sat, 27 Sep 1997 sthaug@nethelp.no wrote:

> > > That's only true of coaxial media.  Over twisted pair, if you see
> > > data start arriving on the receive pair while your transmitting then
> > > you have to assume that the data is being sent by another station
> > > and you've got a collision situation.
> > 
> > Isn't this the hub's responsibility to distinguish and prevent?
> 
> Nope. A hub doesn't do anything with collisions - it just propagates
> them bit by bit. The NICs sense the collision.
> 
> Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no

Technically this is not even a colission  situation.  Many new NICs and
Hubs (both must support it to work) support full-duplex 10BaseT, allowing
20MBits/sec.  I am not sure what happens when it gets into the hub and
needs to be propogated to other ports though *shrug*.

Anyway... multiple packets being transmitted at the same time is detected
by the NIC, and the NIC then sends a jamming signal which stops all
transmissions on the network for a random time (each card that was
transmitting durring this time sets a ranom timer for how long to wait,
and they all try to re-transmit, using exponential backoff if there are
additional collisions).  This jamming signal is the actual 'collision',
and is what shows up as a colision light on hubs/external transcievers.

Excellent and page-turning reading that 802.* ;)

--
David Cross





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