🚀 go-pugleaf

Craig Dewick wrote: 
 > I'd like to track down a small quantity (say 5 or so) of Sbus 10baseT
 > (preferably buffered) ethernet cards to drop into my systems and
improve the
 > ethernet performance of my machines.

If it's an SBus-based SPARC, it's already got a 10Mbps Ethernet port on
it. Some of the earlier models require a transciever ($25 max), but they
can all be attached to a 10BaseT ethernet easily, and the performance is
just as good as any SBus ethernet adapter you could install.

How do you think adding an SBus ethernet card will "improve ethernet
performance"? You might have the wrong idea about an ethernet.

The only real reasons to add a 10BaseT SBus ethernet port are these:
1. To replace a blown ethernet port.
2. To set the system up to function as a router between two networks.

You will only improve ethernet performance if you move to 100BaseT.

The 10Mbps speed rating for standard ethernet is not a per-connection
rating like you have on a modem. Rather, it is the total bandwidth that
is shared between all of the computers on a physical hub. Ethernet
cannot be multiplexed to make a faster connection. Making 2 10Mbps
connections from one computer to the same physical hub will not get you
20Mbps worth of bandwidth. You will still only have 10Mbps worth of
bandwidth, and a very confused computer.

Now, you can get creative and create two or more separate networks if
you want, with completely separate hubs and wiring, separate sets of IP
addresses, etc., and manually load-balance your systems on a per-service
basis I suppose. You could say that network A is for normal telnet, ftp,
http, and set up a separate network B for NFS traffic only. Figuring it
all out and whether or not this would improve performance is left as an
exercise to you (I once did something similar, completely by accident,
during a transition from 10Base2 to a switched 10BaseT network).