No too hard, actually. There's just a couple absolute rules: the ring must be terminated (as in, not open) and the parameters must agree (16Meg, or 4 Meg).
With 16meg, you'll probably have have Early Token Release on by default, it's a good thing.
You don't mention any Token Ring NICs ... Madge is very popular (personally, I hate 'em), 3COM, IBM, Olicom, SysKonnect are all very good.
If you're using UTP ( it looks like you are), then watch to make sure the ring is terminated (probably a switch or loopback on the RJ45 MAU). The termination point is usually the "Ring In" and "Ring out" ports (RI / RO). If those are RJ45 jacks, then they probably aren't self-terminating like the traditional IBM Data Connector (the goofy boy-george self-mating monsters designed by IBM) and may need loopback plugs if there aren't any "wrap" switches.
It should work womething like this: When the NIC initializes, it sends itself a batch of tokens (self test) so it's important that the cable (especially UTP) be plugged in (again, the original "Adapter Cable" was self-shorting, so if it wasn't plugged in, it looped back to itself).
Then (assuming the self-test went OK) the NIC shoots a bunch of traffic onto the ring. At the end of that sequence, the NIC knows it's address is unique, and it knows who the neighbors are (at least the Nearest Upstream Active Neighbor (NUAN)).
After that dance is finished, and everything has happened as it's s'posed to, the NIC is now fully initialized and ready to start talking. All of the switching, signalling states, insertion, etc is done by manipulating some phantom voltages.
If something doesn't happen right, the NIC won't initialize and you'll get some flavor of failure message.
The UTP cabling is the same as Ethernet (uses different pair than Ethernet (3,4 & 5, 6)) but 16 meg TR only needed Cat 4.
The STP cables were: The "Adapter Cable" - DB9 at one end, Data conenctor at the other, and "Patch cable" - data connector at each end. The DB9 uses the two pairs of outside pins (like 1&6, 5&9). All of the STP cables were straight-through. There *was* a cross-over cable, used ONLY for certain switch/mau combinations - you CANNOT go PC-to-PC with token ring, you *MUST* use a MAU, CAU, switch, bridge ....
Token Ring actually works pretty well. You'll probably like it.
When you get some specific questions, put 'em up. I know there's some old ring-heads still floating around. I've put in thousands of TR nodes ... once you get used to it, it doesn't suck.
Good Luck & Have fun
Scott
A good web site that explains it will work.
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