XP pro and 10Base2 (coax/BNC...): problems?

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G

Guest

Hello,

having a weird problem here and wondering whether anyone has seen something
similar...

I needed to install an XP-PC in a building that is somewhat seperate from
the rest of the company, and only attached to the network via a 10base2-link
(3Com hubs with BNC-connector, one hub itself connected to a 100Mbit 10BaseT
backbone switch)

I could not make the PC connect to the network. A few years ago we had some
NT4 PCs working over this exact same connection. Since it hadn"t been used or
changed for some time I suspected a hardware problem somewhere and started
replacing hubs, T-pieces and terminators, to no avail.

To make sure that I was using good hardware, I then decided to first make a
small network with the two hubs, a piece of coax/10base2 cable and the needed
T-pieces and terminators. So I connected the 2 hubs via the coax, plugged a
PC into a RJ45-port in each of the hubs, assigned fixed 192.168.0.1 and
192.168.0.2 addresses and tried to let them ping eachother. It didn't work!

The very strange thing was, that I could clearly see activity on hub2 when I
pinged from the PC on hub1 and the other way around, PLUS: they COULD see
(ping) each other as soon as I used UTP cables to connect the 2 hubs!

So everything pointed towards the coax-side of things. Yet, all LEDs were
normal, I tried several different hubs, cables and T-pieces/terminators...

Now I was wondering that maybe XP Pro may have issues with the old 10base2
technique? Although I would expect total transparancy (certainly since the
PCs themselves were connected via UTP, and only the hubs interconnected via
10base2)

any ideas?
 
Aside of hardware issues like >= 50 cm of good RG58, good T-connectors and
terminators of 50 Ohms without drop-cables did you try to lock XP on 10 Mbps
half duplex? Is there any collision indicator?
 
The 10 Mbps half duplex thing sounds good (killing myself that I didn't
come up with that myself!!)

Gonna try that and report back.
 
I'm still alive ;-)

Well, I must have been totally confused by all the hardware replacements and
everything that I had tried that day, because yesterday everything suddenly
worked fine without tweaking any network settings or components... Did not
repeat the test with the two hubs, though. Most important thing is that it
works again
 
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