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 Moody Bible College
(www.moody.edu), located in Chicago, needed to revamp its network infrastructure to
link the college’s many buildings to the physical plant’s building
management system. Access to the network was via dial-up connections to a server.
Since the school consists of a central campus area and several other buildings
scattered around a 12-block area in downtown Chicago, this proved cumbersome and
quite unsatisfactory.
Moody’s Fiber Ring At Moody, the core of the network is the 100BASE-FX fiber ring. However, the
physical plant uses a building management system made by Andover Controls to
monitor and regulate all building services from air conditioning and heating to the
keypad and security access. In addition, the system keeps track of boilers, water
pumps and fans.
| Linking a pair of different media – like coax and fiber – with the
fiber running at different speeds, proved to be a challenge. It was tough to
“see” all of the network devices that were being linked. In addition,
there were a number of 10/100 switches that insisted on crashing if everything was
not set up perfectly.
| Paul Siebold, department manager for engineering systems, was able to build a
network that allowed him to put all of the building management controllers
together. It is on a 100BASE-TX Ethernet network and is separate from the
school’s IS network.
| “I needed something to connect all of this together,” Siebold says.
Most of the building management network is 10BASE2 coax. “I wanted the server
and the workstations we were using to do our programming to be at 100Mbps since we
do pass graphics on them,” he explains.
| He was not interested in spending a wad of money on fancy switches that would give
him every conceivable port combination possible. “I bought NetGear’s
FS-508 8-port 10/100 auto sensing switches. They allow us to connect the 10Mbps
controllers, 100Mbps workstations and the server together.”
| Of course, he wanted the backbone to be 100BASE-FX, so he needed | 100BASE-TX to 100BASE-FX media converters. He looked for a converter but came up
empty. Nobody had a product compatible with auto-sensing technology.
“Everybody was making the switches, but none of the converters were able to
talk to them,” Siebold says.
| The blockage of the auto-sensing information made it necessary to manually
reconfigure the hub, switch or router port to either full or half duplex. In the
best of scenarios, this requires time-consuming intervention at the management
console or removing the cover to configure dip switches. In the worst cases, it
simply was not possible to make the link come up right. Devices wanted to see a
100-based port. But the 10/100 switches were wired to say that, unless told
otherwise, links had to be treated as 10Mbps. “The switches insist on
auto-sensing (that’s their reason for existence),” Siebold says.
| He discovered engineers at Transition Networks were working on the problem and an
account manager obtained two prototype stand-alone units for Siebold to try.
| “We plugged them in and they worked fine. They just came right up and
everything worked the way it was supposed to work. We put them in and, quite
frankly, I’ve forgotten about them,” Siebold says. “They just
work. They give us no trouble.”
| Further Savings | About six months after moving the computer room, the campus engineer decided to
upgrade the campus feed for the domain from 10Mbps Ethernet to Fast Ethernet.
“Once again, Transition's chassis proved its value because all that needed to
happen was changing the media converter from a 10BASE-FL/ 10BASE-T to a
100BASE-FX/100BASE-TX,” Guster says.
| “Because the center supports hot swap capability, the conversion could
easily be accomplished in five to ten minutes,” he adds.
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