FDDI and NICs

[l3l00]

So here is my dilenma , just got hired on to this new booming enterprise company. My boss had mentioned they are moving to a new site and at this new site heis installing fiber optics. Honestly forthe site of them and the am mount of co workers this is sort of über kill. Whatever I had no say in the planning of this.

So my concern is (letting you know now, never worked with FDDI before). Knowing if these computers in the office would be compatible? All of them are new and I also had no planning insight to the purchases of these comps. If not, would it be more logical to find a switch that is FDDI and then connect that one to a bunch of cat5e or 6 Ethernet switches or purchase a NIC card that is FDDI compatible for every desktop?

One last thing, he had mentioned the fiber optics will be transferring at 3 gigs a second. Sound I even bother setting up a network load balance server?

 

[theevilsharpie]

FDDI? 3Gb/s Fiber? Network load balance server? WTF?

I want to believe that your post is the product of a language translator, but it seems too coherent for that. My suggestion would be to hire a consultant that knows what he or she is doing.

 

[l3l00]

Um, no. I am not using a language translator, this is a ligit question. They might have a contractor that is setting it up, just in case if it falls on my lap I want to know what I should do to fix the issue before it becomes a disaster.

For the most part I think incorporating a bunch of switches would be wise.
Also a NLB more than likely would not be necessary, just enated to get a better insight.
More or less I know I will be setting up an AD Server and an Application Server as well.

The maybe would be a file server for offline files, that I will do through a red hat district utilizing samba (I just know it better)

 

[drebo]

Why on earth would you deploy FDDI? 2000 called and wants it's tech back.

 

[JackMDS]

IP seems to belong to http://www.cnm.edu/

As I can see he dilemma is Not technology but.. Should I do the job that I hired for, or look for another Job.

 

[ScottMac]

OP: Could it be that you are confusing "fiber" and "FDDI" (an ancient fiber-based technology)?

For fiber these days, it would likely be a flovor of GigE, 10GigE, maybe even 40GigE ... then there's FiberChannel, which was used to connect server resources to SANs ...

FDDI is extremely unlikely. Check with your netfolk to see what it is they got. If "the boss" said "FDDI," that is a clue that there is no clue abundance within this man's office (i.e., clue vacuum, clue deficit ...).

 

[Gryz]

Why on earth would you deploy FDDI? 2000 called and wants it's tech back.

We got FDDI in our network in 1991, when I was working at a University. By the time I worked in support at a networking company (1994), FDDI was already considered a technology you didn't really want in your network. When FastEthernet came around, everybody forgot about FDDI. When Gigabit Ethernet was introduced in 1998 FDDI was already considered ancient technology.

So you are off by about a decade.

I agree with ScottMac. I think the OP and his boss confuse the terms "fiber" and "fddi".

 

[dawks]

Is he also saying they are going to have fiber to each desktop? what the hell are they doing that would need that bandwidth? an office wide render farm?
What kind of connection is 3Gbps? Network load balancer, hehe.

 

[ScottMac]

Is he also saying they are going to have fiber to each desktop? what the hell are they doing that would need that bandwidth? an office wide render farm?
What kind of connection is 3Gbps? Network load balancer, hehe.

There was a time when fiber-to-the-desktop was all the rage in enterprise networking.
It was usually 62.5/125 MM.

In some cases it was FDDI SAS (Single Attach), some was Token-Ring, ome was some-protocol-feeding-a-FiberMux ... some was even Ethernet (10BASE-F or 100MB)

For once procrastinators won that round ... those that waited just updated their copper.