Case project problem...help needed.

[jspeicher]

Problem:

A company acquires a small business. That small business has copmuter operations which are moved to the main campus. It uses a 16MB token ring network (17KB packet size max) and the rest of the company uses 100MB ethernet supporting 1518 byte packets.

How does mixed media affect IP traffic? Slowed by token?...

What would you look for in your network trace files when you evaluate performance of you internetwork? dropped packets?...

 

[V00D00]

All traffic passing through the token ring network would be significantly slower than that going through the ethernet portion. Simple as pie, their bandwidth is less, so their overall performance would be less. Not to mention that token ring is terribly slow compared to a switched 100mbit network. If there aren't too many nodes in the token ring, you might want to suggest upgrading to cat5 cable and making it a 100mbit ethernet lan

"performance"... that would be overall throughput. Throughput is actual bandwidth the network can put out.

The # of dropped packets would be looking at reliability.

 

[jspeicher]

thanks, anyone else?

 

[spidey07]

well here's the real answer but it doesn't jive with the book.

16 Mb token ring will flat out run 100 Base-T from a performance perspective.

but the real book answer is....

IP packets will get fragmented when the are transmitted from the tokenring net to ethernet due to differeneces in MTU. This could lead to performance problems and high router CPU utilization.