Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 19:38:34 GMT From: jak@cetlink.net (John Kelly) To: "Tony Brooks" <tbrooks@iland.net> Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Token-ring, FreeBSD in LAN Server environment Message-ID: <34cc8dce.1741506@mail.cetlink.net> In-Reply-To: <199801251741.LAA07469@ultra.internetland.net> References: <199801251741.LAA07469@ultra.internetland.net>
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On Sun, 25 Jan 1998 11:46:16 -0600, "Tony Brooks" <tbrooks@iland.net> wrote: >Does FreeBSD have support for Token Ring? Not at this time, although it seems there may be some people working on it soon, if not already. >I have an IBM Token ring environment with IBM LAN Server 4.0. >Will I be able to insert the FreeBSD server into this environment? You can. No hub is required, just two ethernet cards and a BNC cable between them. Put one card in your LAN Server machine and one card in the FreeBSD machine. Clients who need to access the FreeBSD machine must use TCP/IP, and that assumes you will have TCP/IP running on the LAN Server machine to route traffic between the clients and FreeBSD. This will also work if you want to use the FreeBSD machine as in Internet Gateway. And with Samba, FreeBSD makes a good DOS/Windows file server too. But it uses NetBIOS over TCP/IP, not raw NetBEUI/NetBIOS. The only weakness in this approach is IBM's TCP/IP stack which will run on the LS40 machine. I'm not sure how well it will perform or how stable it is. My own experience with IBM TCP/IP on OS/2 indicates that it is weak and not completely stable. The other alternative is BSDI, a commercial product which is a close cousin of FreeBSD. I believe they have token ring driver support and it will only cost you about $1,000 which should be a small cost for a company running a LAN Server environment. BSDI directly attached to your token ring will give you the excellent performance of genuine BSD TCP/IP and not IBM's dubious code. And if you wanted to add FreeBSD servers, via ethernet you could attach the FreeBSD machines to the BSDI machine which would route TCP/IP traffic between the token ring and the ethernet. John
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