Senior Network Analyst, University of Texas at Austin

Stanford SUNet

I have been working with Ethernet technology since 1981, when we began building campus internets at Stanford based on experimental Ethernet and later the 10-Mbps standard Ethernet system. At Stanford University, I worked at Sumex AIM as a member of the group that developed a standalone network router based on a CPU board called the ``SUN'' (Stanford University Network) processor.

In 1981 the SUN processor board became the founding technology for a startup company with the curious name of Sun Microsystems. A few years later the standalone router we developed at Stanford went on to become the founding technology for another startup company called cisco Systems. From little acorns...

At Stanford I also worked for several years with the Networking Services group on the design and development of the campus network system, called SUNet. Stanford University had been an ARPANET site from the earliest days of the world's first Internet, and a number of the core technologies used in the Internet were developed at Stanford. SUNet was one of the first really large campus internets built with routers, and its development taught us many lessons about how such systems grow and evolve.

UTnet

At the University of Texas at Austin I practice the arcane art of designing and developing campus internets based on high speed switches and routers linking a wide variety of Ethernet technologies. The university network, known as UTnet, is based on many Cisco routers and switches, using a fiber optic backbone system. The backbone network consists of fiber optic Ethernet, with many links running at 1 Gbps.

Ethernet Guides

Having spent a wasted youth using and abusing Ethernet technology (among other things) I developed a set of information resources on the Ethernet system. The goal is to help others avoid a similar waste of their youth and accumulation of grey hairs by making it a little easier to find out how the Ethernet system functions and what the correct configuration guidelines may be.

To this end, I brought up a World Wide Web server in 1993 and began porting various documents to HTML format. In February 1994 I announced the Ethernet Web Page, which has become a repository for a wide range of Ethernet documents and other resources. In January 1995, a Quick Reference Guide was added to the Ethernet Web Page. One part of the Quick Reference Guide covers the original 10-Mbps Ethernet system and the other part covers the new 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet system.

Enjoy, and may they help keep the bits flowing for you.

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