1.
Vampire tap
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A vampire tap is a device for physically connecting a station, typically a computer, to a network that uses 10BASE5 cabling. The vampire tap usually has an integrated AUI, from this a short multicore cable connects to the card in the station. Vampire taps allow new connections to be made on a physical cable while the cable is in use. This allows administrators to expand bus-topology network sections without interrupting communications, without a vampire tap, the cable has to be cut and connectors have to be attached to both ends. Network tap Insulation-displacement connector, another insulation-piercing system Image of a Vampire Tap
2.
Medium Attachment Unit
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A Medium Attachment Unit is a transceiver which converts signals on an Ethernet cable to and from Attachment Unit Interface signals. On original 10BASE5 Ethernet, the MAU was typically clamped to the Ethernet cable, for backwards compatibility with equipment which still has external AUI interfaces, MAUs are still available with 10BASE2 or 10BASET connections. The following standard, Fast Ethernet introduces division onto Media Access Controller, some early Fast Ethernet hardware had a physical external MII connectors, functionally similar to AUI connector. Objectives of MAU, Provide the physical means for communication between local network data link entities, Provide a communication channel capable of high bandwidth and low bit error ratio performance. Provide for ease of installation and service, MAU Characteristics, Enables coupling the Physical Layer Signalling by way of the AUI to the explicit baseband coaxial transmission system. Supports message traffic at a rate of 10,100. Provides for driving up to 500m of coaxial cable without the use of a repeater. Permits the DTE to test the MAU and the medium itself, supports system configurations using the CSMA/CD access mechanism defined with baseband signaling. Collision detection and Loop-back functions direct transfer through the MAU and it removes equipment from the network whenever it continuously transmits for periods significantly longer than required for a maximum-length packet, indicating a possible problem with the NIC. The signal quality error test detects silent failures in the circuitry, Link integrity functions detects breaks in the wire pairs. Both Signal quality error test and Link integrity functions assist in fault isolation, two modes of operation, Normal mode, The MAU functions as a direct connection between the baseband medium and the DTE. Data output from the DTE is output to the coaxial trunk medium and this mode is the “normal” mode of operation for the intended message traffic between stations. Monitor mode or Isolated mode, The MAU functions as a connection between the baseband medium and the DTE. Data output from the DTE is suppressed and only data on the coaxial trunk medium is input to the DTE and this mode is for observing message traffic. Receive function The ability to receive serial data bit streams over the baseband medium, collision Presence function The ability to detect the presence of two or more stations concurrent transmissions. Monitor function The ability to inhibit the normal transmit data stream to the medium at the time the normal receive function and collision presence function remain operational. Jabber function The ability to interrupt the transmit function and inhibit an abnormally long output data stream. It removes equipment from the network whenever it continuously transmits for periods longer than required for a maximum-length packet
3.
Ethernet
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Ethernet /ˈiːθərnɛt/ is a family of computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks, metropolitan area networks and wide area networks. It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE802.3, over time, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies such as token ring, FDDI and ARCNET. The original 10BASE5 Ethernet uses coaxial cable as a medium, while the newer Ethernet variants use twisted pair. Over the course of its history, Ethernet data transfer rates have increased from the original 2.94 megabits per second to the latest 100 gigabits per second. The Ethernet standards comprise several wiring and signaling variants of the OSI physical layer in use with Ethernet, systems communicating over Ethernet divide a stream of data into shorter pieces called frames. As per the OSI model, Ethernet provides services up to, since its commercial release, Ethernet has retained a good degree of backward compatibility. Features such as the 48-bit MAC address and Ethernet frame format have influenced other networking protocols, the primary alternative for some uses of contemporary LANs is Wi-Fi, a wireless protocol standardized as IEEE802.11. Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC between 1973 and 1974 and it was inspired by ALOHAnet, which Robert Metcalfe had studied as part of his PhD dissertation. In 1975, Xerox filed a patent application listing Metcalfe, David Boggs, Chuck Thacker, in 1976, after the system was deployed at PARC, Metcalfe and Boggs published a seminal paper. Metcalfe left Xerox in June 1979 to form 3Com and he convinced Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and Xerox to work together to promote Ethernet as a standard. The so-called DIX standard, for Digital/Intel/Xerox, specified 10 Mbit/s Ethernet, with 48-bit destination and source addresses and it was published on September 30,1980 as The Ethernet, A Local Area Network. Data Link Layer and Physical Layer Specifications, version 2 was published in November,1982 and defines what has become known as Ethernet II. Formal standardization efforts proceeded at the time and resulted in the publication of IEEE802.3 on June 23,1983. Ethernet initially competed with two largely proprietary systems, Token Ring and Token Bus, in the process, 3Com became a major company. 3Com shipped its first 10 Mbit/s Ethernet 3C100 NIC in March 1981, an Ethernet adapter card for the IBM PC was released in 1982, and, by 1985, 3Com had sold 100,000. Parallel port based Ethernet adapters were produced for a time, with drivers for DOS, by the early 1990s, Ethernet became so prevalent that it was a must-have feature for modern computers, and Ethernet ports began to appear on some PCs and most workstations. This process was sped up with the introduction of 10BASE-T and its relatively small modular connector. Since then, Ethernet technology has evolved to meet new bandwidth, in addition to computers, Ethernet is now used to interconnect appliances and other personal devices
4.
10BASE2
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As of 2011, IEEE802.3 has deprecated this standard for new installations. The name 10BASE2 is derived from several characteristics of the physical medium, the 10 comes from the transmission speed of 10 Mbit/s. The BASE stands for baseband signalling, and the 2 for a maximum segment length approaching 200 m.10 Mbit/s Ethernet uses Manchester coding. A binary zero is indicated by a low to high transition in the middle of the bit period and this allows the clock to be recovered from the signal. However, the additional transitions double the signal bandwidth, 10BASE2 coax cables have a maximum length of 185 metres. The maximum practical number of nodes that can be connected to a 10BASE2 segment is limited to 30 with a distance of 50 cm. In a 10BASE2 network, each stretch of cable is connected to the using a BNC T-connector. The T-connector must be plugged directly into the network adaptor with no cable in between, as is the case with most other high-speed buses, Ethernet segments have to be terminated with a resistor at each end. Each end of the cable has a 50 ohm resistor attached, typically this resistor is built into a male BNC and attached to the last device on the bus. This is most commonly connected directly to the T-connector on a workstation though it not technically have to be. A few devices such as Digitals DEMPR and DESPR have a built-in terminator, if termination is missing, or if there is a break in the cable, the AC signal on the bus is reflected, rather than dissipated, when it reaches the end. This reflected signal is indistinguishable from a collision, so no communication can take place, when wiring a 10BASE2 network, special care has to be taken to ensure that cables are properly connected to all T-connectors, and appropriate terminators are installed. One, and only one, terminator must be connected to ground via a ground wire, bad contacts or shorts are especially difficult to diagnose, though a time-domain reflectometer will find most problems quickly. A failure at any point of the network cabling tends to prevent all communications, for this reason, 10BASE2 networks can be difficult to maintain and were often replaced by 10BASE-T networks, which also provided a good upgrade path to 100BASE-TX. An alternative, more reliable connection was established by the introduction of EAD sockets, there were proprietary wallport/cable systems that claimed to avoid these problems but these never became widespread, possibly due to a lack of standardization. 10BASE2 systems do have a number of advantages over 10BASE-T, no hub is required as with 10BASE-T, so the hardware cost is minimal, and wiring can be particularly easy since only a single wire run is needed, which can be sourced from the nearest computer. These characteristics mean that 10BASE2 is ideal for a network of two or three machines, perhaps in a home where easily concealed wiring may be an advantage. For a larger complex office network, the difficulties of tracing poor connections make it impractical, unfortunately for 10BASE2, by the time multiple home computer networks became common, the format had already been practically superseded
5.
Ethernet over twisted pair
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Ethernet over twisted pair technologies use twisted-pair cables for the physical layer of an Ethernet computer network. Early Ethernet had used various grades of coaxial cable, but in 1984 and this led to the development of 10BASE-T and its successors 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE-T, supporting speeds of 10,100 and 1,000 Mbit/s respectively. All these three standards define both full-duplex and half-duplex communication, however, half-duplex operation for gigabit speed isnt supported by any existing hardware. All these standards use 8P8C connectors, and the cables from Cat3 to Cat8 have four pairs of wires, though 10BASE-T, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standards association ratified several versions of the technology. The first two designs were StarLAN, standardized in 1986, at one megabit per second, and LattisNet, developed in January 1987. Both were developed before the 10BASE-T standard and used different signalling, in 1988 AT&T released StarLAN10, named for working at 10 Mbit/s. The StarLAN10 signalling was used as the basis of 10BASE-T, the centralized star topology was a more common approach to cabling than the bus in earlier standards and easier to manage. Using point-to-point links instead of a shared bus greatly simplified troubleshooting and was prone to failure. Exchanging cheap repeater hubs for more advanced switching hubs provided an upgrade path. Mixing different speeds in a single network became possible with the arrival of Fast Ethernet, depending on cable grades, subsequent upgrading to Gigabit Ethernet or faster may be as easy as replacing the network switches. The common names for the standards derive from aspects of the physical media, the leading number refers to the transmission speed in Mbit/s. BASE denotes that baseband transmission is used, the T designates twisted pair cable, where the pair of wires for each signal is twisted together to reduce radio frequency interference and crosstalk between pairs. Where there are standards for the same transmission speed, they are distinguished by a letter or digit following the T, such as TX, referring to the encoding method. Twisted-pair Ethernet standards are such that the majority of cables can be wired straight-through and it is conventional to wire cables for 10- or 100-Mbit/s Ethernet to either the T568A or T568B standards. The terms used in the explanations of the 568 standards, tip and ring, refer to older communication technologies, and equate to the positive and negative parts of the connections. A 10BASE-T or 100BASE-TX node such as a PC uses a connector wiring called medium dependent interfaces, transmitting on pin 1 and 2, an infrastructure node accordingly uses a connector wiring called MDI-X, transmitting on pin 3 and 6 and receiving on pin 1 and 2. These ports are connected using a cable, so each transmitter talks to the receiver on the other side. Nodes can have two types of ports, MDI or MDI-X, hubs and switches have regular ports
6.
Fast Ethernet
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In computer networking, Fast Ethernet is a collective term for a number of Ethernet standards that carry traffic at the nominal rate of 100 Mbit/s. Of the Fast Ethernet standards, 100BASE-TX is by far the most common, Fast Ethernet was introduced in 1995 as the IEEE802. 3u standard and remained the fastest version of Ethernet for three years before the introduction of Gigabit Ethernet. The acronym GE/FE is sometimes used for supporting both standards. Fast Ethernet is an extension of the 10-megabit Ethernet standard and it runs on UTP data or optical fiber cable in a star wired bus topology, similar to 10BASE-T where all cables are attached to a hub. Fast Ethernet devices are backward compatible with existing 10BASE-T systems. Fast Ethernet is sometimes referred to as 100BASE-X, where X is a placeholder for the FX, the standard specifies the use of CSMA/CD for media access control. A full-duplex mode is also specified and in all modern networks use Ethernet switches. The 100 in the type designation refers to the transmission speed of 100 Mbit/s. The letter following the dash refers to the medium that carries the signal. A Fast Ethernet adapter can be divided into a media access controller, which deals with the higher-level issues of medium availability. The MAC may be linked to the PHY by a four-bit 25 MHz synchronous parallel interface known as a media-independent interface, in rare cases the MII may be an external connection but is usually a connection between ICs in a network adapter or even within a single IC. The specs are based on the assumption that the interface between MAC and PHY will be a MII but they do not require it. Repeaters may use the MII to connect to multiple PHYs for their different interfaces, the MII fixes the theoretical maximum data bit rate for all versions of Fast Ethernet to 100 Mbit/s. 100BASE-T is any of several Fast Ethernet standards for twisted pair cables, including, 100BASE-TX, 100BASE-T4, the segment length for a 100BASE-T cable is limited to 100 metres. All are or were standards under IEEE802.3, almost all 100BASE-T installations are 100BASE-TX. In the early days of Fast Ethernet, much vendor advertising centered on claims by competing standards that said vendors standards will work better with existing cables than other standards. Thus most networks had to be rewired for 100 Megabit speed whether or not there had supposedly been CAT3 or CAT5 cable runs, 100BASE-TX is the predominant form of Fast Ethernet, and runs over two wire-pairs inside a category 5 or above cable. Like 10BASE-T, the pairs in a standard connection are terminated on pins 1,2,3 and 6
7.
Gigabit Ethernet
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In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet is a term describing various technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second, as defined by the IEEE802. 3-2008 standard. It came into use beginning in 1999, gradually supplanting Fast Ethernet in wired local networks, the cables and equipment are very similar to previous standards and have been very common and economical since 2010. Ethernet was the result of the research done at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s, Ethernet later evolved into a widely implemented physical and link layer protocol. Fast Ethernet increased speed from 10 to 100 megabits per second, Gigabit Ethernet was the next iteration, increasing the speed to 1000 Mbit/s. The initial standard for Gigabit Ethernet was produced by the IEEE in June 1998 as IEEE802. 3z,802. 3z is commonly referred to as 1000BASE-X, where -X refers to either -CX, -SX, -LX, or -ZX. For the history behind the X see Fast Ethernet, IEEE802. 3ab, ratified in 1999, defines Gigabit Ethernet transmission over unshielded twisted pair category 5, 5e or 6 cabling, and became known as 1000BASE-T. With the ratification of 802. 3ab, Gigabit Ethernet became a desktop technology as organizations could use their existing copper cabling infrastructure, IEEE802. 3ah, ratified in 2004 added two more gigabit fiber standards, 1000BASE-LX10 and 1000BASE-BX10. This was part of a group of protocols known as Ethernet in the First Mile. Initially, Gigabit Ethernet was deployed in high-capacity backbone network links, in 2000, Apples Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 were the first mass-produced personal computers featuring the 1000BASE-T connection. It quickly became a feature in many other computers. There are five physical layer standards for Gigabit Ethernet using optical fiber, twisted pair cable and these standards use 8b/10b encoding, which inflates the line rate by 25%, from 1000 Mbit/s to 1250 Mbit/s, to ensure a DC balanced signal. The symbols are sent using NRZ. Optical fiber transceivers are most often implemented as modules in SFP form or GBIC on older devices. IEEE802. 3ab, which defines the widely used 1000BASE-T interface type, uses a different encoding scheme in order to keep the rate as low as possible. IEEE802. 3ap defines Ethernet Operation over Electrical Backplanes at different speeds, Ethernet in the First Mile later added 1000BASE-LX10 and -BX10. 1000BASE-CX is a standard for Gigabit Ethernet connections with maximum distances of 25 meters using balanced shielded twisted pair. The short segment length is due to high signal transmission rate. 1000BASE-KX is part of the IEEE802. 3ap standard for Ethernet Operation over Electrical Backplanes and this standard defines one to four lanes of backplane links, one RX and one TX differential pair per lane, at link bandwidth ranging from 100Mbit to 10Gbit per second
