Does Anyone Still Use Token Ring? 185
blanchae asks: "Does anyone still use Token Ring, or is it dead? I remember hearing about 100 mbps TR a few years ago but nothing since. I remember that the strong point of TR over Ethernet was the QOS and the consistent response time. Does the banking community still use TR?"
token ring usage (Score:3, Interesting)
100mbps version existed, but AFAIK tokenring is now extinct. Everyone is moving to wifi, anyway.
Re:token ring usage (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:token ring usage (Score:4, Interesting)
It's redundancy, of a kind
NOOOOOO!!!!! (Score:2, Informative)
NO!! That's way to general of an assumption and is just wrong. It's like saying everyone is deploying CAT5e, or everyone is deploying fiber. I would say it is a mix of the three, cat5e for Ethernet (up to 10Gbe soon!), fiber for higher speed or longer run needs, and wifi where needed. How ever, we have setup a lot of networks and the vast majority of people (businesses any way) and still deploying CAT5e. Wireless is just nerver going to be fast enough, secure enough, and r
Re:token ring usage (Score:2)
Over my dead body they are! Are you joking?
Seriously, I have yet to actually have a GOOD experience with Wifi. At two of the sites I support we have wireless laptop trolleys (18 laptops, 2 access points - the recommended amount) and neither of them "just work" like they should be.
This isn't my incompetence either before you assume that. We setup one of them, and the other was setup by an external company. A company, I might add, that had to come in about 5 times before the
Answer. (Score:2)
No.
Re:Answer. (Score:2)
Deep down... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Deep down... (Score:2, Funny)
I doubt it (Score:2)
Re:I doubt it (Score:2)
but I was walking around our dev lab and saw what looked like some of accordingthose evil token ring boxes with all the connectors. MUX did they call them?
Anyway... theres still companies with old ass systems still in service. I know it must be used somewhere.
Lets not forget department stores too... they buy a system for the store to run all the cash registers etc, how often do you think they upgrade their systems?
IBM did alot of those systems, alot of them used token ring to commu
Re:I doubt it (Score:2)
Which means that is is a dead technology.
Advantages? (Score:2)
Re:Advantages? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most places with even the largest investments switched out years ago. At some point the cost of maintaining TR exceeded the cost of reinstalling new network gear. These days, if there are any TR nodes left, they probably exist in isolation. When our company was upgrading the
Re:Advantages? (Score:2)
Re:Advantages? (Score:2)
Re:Advantages? (Score:2, Informative)
Short answer (Score:2)
Token Ring is a great idea, in theory, but in the days of full-duplex GigE over Cat5e with 100 hosts on a segment, passing a token around is horribly inefficient, as well as pointless. We don't need it, so why use it? Old installations should have been replaced years ago, moved up to commodity ethernet hardware that everyone and their dog supports, for less than it costs to employ someone who knows about token ring.
Not Really. (Score:3, Informative)
Rings themselves are still used, just in other topologies. You may still see some FDDI [wikipedia.org] here and there, and many cable companies use RPR [wikipedia.org]/DTP/SRP [wikipedia.org] to deliver digital cable and broadband access at the same time in their cores.
Either way, I'm sure the pointy haired boss doesn't miss it [ozguru.mu.nu].
Hopefully Not... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its only advantage was that it could run at much higher utilization than ethernet without your network choking - we would see times where a ring would be running at 75% and that was no problem.
However, it was a real problem from a financial and operational standpoint. When we bought new PC's, we would rip out the ethernet cards and install Olicom TR cards we paid $180 each for - we got a good deal because we bought hundreds of them. Server-class cards were more - a lot more.
And we did get the 100Mb token ring switches, which was truly one of the more absurd things I have ever seen IT money spent on. I still don't have a clear idea how this was a good thing: you got a 100Mb token ring switch, which would create a ring on each port. Then you could plug exactly one device into each port, as long as it had a 100Mb token ring adapter. This was 5 years ago, and I remember that per port, it was price-competitive with Gig-E fiber.
Then there are the usual entertaining issues with drivers and growing the network. Need an extra PC at your desk? You can't just plug a hub in and go - you have to pull another cable from the wiring closet. You need certified drivers for your Windows cluster? How about a touch-screen network device for your truck terminals? A firewall? A NAS? No, you can't have any of those.
I know there are plenty of people who will swear by TR. You'll find the evolved version of this technology in FDDI rings - and it makes a lot of sense and works very well in that application. But as a LAN for your company, it sucks ass...technically, the concept is sound but nobody is developing it further and it takes a lot more specialized knowledge and maintenance overhead than ethernet. And every year that goes by makes it much more expensive to keep it than to switch to ethernet.
I turned down a job 3 years ago at a place that was still running TR - a mid-sized retail chain. They said they were starting to look in to ethernet, but were happy with their token rings. That was the deciding factor for me to keep looking...At this point, a company that isn't actively working to replace TR with something else has some serious management issues and I would wonder what else was lying inder the surface.
So if you can find a few cards and a MAU somewhere, experiment with it at home. But avoid it like the plague in a business setting. That's just my $.02 anyway.
Re:Hopefully Not... (Score:2)
Re:Hopefully Not... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hopefully Not... (Score:2)
Re:Hopefully Not... (Score:4, Informative)
As you say, it's a bit absurd to use expensive TR switches like that (instead of cheap Ethernet switches) -- since in a single-NIC-per-port arrangement there's no chance for collisions in any case, so TR's main advantage is meaningless.
Still, it made sense to migrate to TR switches -- but by having small rings of clients share switch ports, and dedicating a port to a single system only for real bottleneck systems such as file servers. If you ask me, the real reason to stick with TR would have been that switching to Ethernet would meant either replacing everything at once (prohibitive in labour cost and downtime) or a potentially messy gradual transition either with routers (and a whole lot of reconfiguration of systems) or translational bridging (here be dragons).
Re:Hopefully Not... (Score:2)
Token Ring is dead -- D-E-A-D -- dead. It has lost the war. As I said, cheap smart Ethernet switches make TR's advantages irrelevant.
If you're seriously wondering whether TR is used for new LANs, please put down that crack pipe. You do not have to be the Tivo owner that starts VHS vs. Beta arguments; you can salvage what little dignity you have left and move along.
Re: (Score:2)
Washinton Mutual (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Washinton Mutual (Score:2)
Coincidence?
token ring?, yeah, sort of.... (Score:2)
support ethernet, so we use it. I still have the 4-port TR card in my 7500 router. And if I dig around
I'm sure to find a MAU somewhere.
Re:token ring?, yeah, sort of.... (Score:2)
Token Ring (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Token Ring (Score:5, Funny)
We tended to be a little more technically oriented where I went to school and used a water cooled device.
Re:Token Ring (Score:2)
Re:Token Ring (Score:2)
Re:Token Ring (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Token Ring (Score:2, Funny)
One Ring to Rule Them All (Score:2)
Re:Token Ring (Score:2)
Re:Token Ring (Score:2)
Re:Token Ring (Score:2)
Re:Token Ring (Score:3, Funny)
Token Ring makes a lot of sense (Score:2)
I used to (Score:2)
All that was phased out late 90s. (Score:2)
Banks, I still used to see OS/2 based ATMs and stuff until '99. You could go in, and see it on the backs of desktop machines in the lobby too, until right around then. I've not seen anything but windows and ethernet since, though.
One of my sparcstations has token ring. A few of the macs have it. And I have one in my main linux server too... but ifconfig up'ing it is asking fo
Some still exists (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the side effects of some companies locked into dino^H^H^H^Hlegac^H^H^H^Htime tested solutions, is that they have to pay whatever it takes for dino^H^H^H^Hexperienced old-fa^H^Htimers to come in and fix the fsckups caused by young ignoramuses not having any knowledge of TR. My going rate right now is EUR400/hour, with a minimum of an 8 hour payment up front before I even set foot on the premises, and I still get called out about 3 times per year. get off my lawn...
Cisco must still have TR, I met a dejected CCIE candidate who told me he paid many thousands of euros for a one week CCIE-mill course, which took him from windoze point and click to supposedly a CCIE, only to have half his stack be wired with TR which the fly-by-night company had never heard of. Clearly the CCIE proctors have some tricks up their sleeves when they detect a candidate who has all the answers but none of the experience.
the AC
As well, my cisco study kit still has some 2513s and AGS+s and a box of TR cables (hermaphrodite and RJ45), ISA cards, and some 8228s. I haven't touched any of it in at least 5 years
Saw Ring Token In Action Last Year... (Score:3, Interesting)
The worst part of the job was cleaning up after the two junior technicians who plugged the Ethernet cable into the Token Ring adapter board instead of the Ethernet port. For all 90 machines. They then wondered why I got more respect from the project leader. I kept telling them to get their certifications.
Sites where IT kit is rarely changed (Score:2, Interesting)
The power stations have had IT infrastructure for years (probably 5+ years more than the average office, after networking kit for nuclear and safety related stuff I should think), and the kit installed at the time would have been possibly the fastest available. Upgrading doesn't happen because of the way the operation
Only if they have to (Score:2)
At some point it just becomes too expensive to maintain and replace/repair, and that high cost of installation for a switch to ethernet looks better and better.
I'm assuming not. (Score:3, Informative)
Madge Networks, a one time competitor to IBM, is now considered to be the market leader in Token Ring.
From [[Madge Networks]] [wikipedia.org]:
Madge Networks NV. was a global leader and pioneer of high speed networking solutions in the mid 1990s. The company was founded by Robert Madge.
The company filed for bankruptcy in April 2003.
Granted, they still exist, and sell stuff, but for a market monopoly to file for bankruptcy...can't be too many customers left, can there?
To_ke_n Ring (Score:2)
Token ring has too many drawbacks. (Score:3, Interesting)
Ethernet won't work so well for a bus layout, but it works great for a star layout. Token ring is supposed to be awesome on a bus layout, because of how it manages access to the network resources, but it's not something that's better in reality (only in theory).
Plus, as devices scale up, the simpler (and thus cheaper and easier to design) ethernet go there first. Token ring just is not efficient from a cost perspective. We don't use token ring for the same reason we don't use RISC machines -- money and economies of scale
In any case... (Score:2)
If every port isn't directly switched on your network, then someone fucked up. There's just no excuse.
Re:Token ring has too many drawbacks. (Score:2)
Or, in other words, the advantages that Token Ring has turned out to be unnecessary for the way LANs came to be used. Until recen
yeah I saw that movie... (Score:2)
does anyone still make them?
TR is dead.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know we have one small location that still has TR because the site has been on the chopping block for 4 years.
(It's finally closing this year.)
I know we stopped installing it in new locations about 10 years ago in favor of Ethernet. My site (and most of the rest of the bank) was upgraded from TR to Ethernet(100Mb) about 5 years ago.
Banks and any other large companies are going to stick to industry standards in order to reduce costs and complexity. I know we've had a hell of a time finding replacement hardware for the switching/routing equipment in that last TR location. My point is, why should a large company build a custom LAN network when the cheaper, easier technology will do just fine. e.g. We would have to disable the ethernet adapter in the Dell workstations we use and install TR cards. I have a laptop...I'd have to find a PCMCIA TR card. This is exactly the type of BS that large companies don't want to deal with.
Here's the real reason TR is dead: QOS was only an issue with Ethernet when you had people using hubs. Now that massive switches are the norm, it isn't an issue since each user can run in full duplex. If you're on a hub, you're sharing bandwidth. If you're on a switch, you've got 100Mb all to yourself. (Unlike a hub, the switch can buffer the frames if the destination port is busy.) In addition, you can run in duplex which means your ethernet card can send and receive at the same time. If your office is using a switch, it's your WAN connections you have to worry about, not your LAN.
And thats just for the cube farm. For the server room we have either dual 100Mb or dual 1000Mb connections to multiple backbones (more for redundancy than bandwidth.) There are also dedicated fiber going to SANS drives.
The computer in my cube is piggy-backed onto a Cisco IP phone, which all goes to a single 100Mb switch port. I have never had a problem with it.
Token Ring is DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.
Re:TR is dead.... (Score:4, Informative)
I have one, made by IBM. I'd sell it.
Re:TR is dead.... (Score:2)
One of the earlier posts in this discussion was a guy who says they have to pay $180 per card (!).
I'm wishing I had kept a few for eBay.
Oh that takes me back.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh that takes me back.. (Score:2)
Government (Score:2)
token_ring (Score:2)
Re:token_ring (Score:2)
Sorta... (Score:2)
No, except for this one guy, (Score:2)
Token Ring...tops in IT flops of last 20 yrs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Network World's [networkworld.com] editors and columnist have nominated their favorite [networkworld.com]
IT flops of the last 20 years, making for an interesting and entertaining read. Among the flops are the OSI protocol and technologies such as ATM and Token Ring, but also making the list IBM, Microsoft's Bob and ME, and the Apple Newton.
Token ring (Score:2)
RIP Token Ring (Score:2)
Why its gone (Score:5, Informative)
Look at why: With token ring, only the card holding the token could transmit. Everybody else had to wait for the token. So each station would empty its transmit queue and then pass the token on to the next station. On ethernet, a station would send a packet whenever and if another station sent a packet at about the same time they'd collide. Every station observing the collision would assert a collision signal and after the collision signal cleared the two stations that transmitted would wait a random period of time and then retransmit. That's oversimplifying a bit but more or less correct.
So, token ring was much more stable in a large LAN with a high probability of multiple stations having outbound traffic ready at the same time.
Now, along comes 100baseTX on cat5, the end of coaxial ethernet and the proliferation of $50 switches. When you're plugged in to a switch there are only two devices in the collision domain: you and the switch. So, lots less collisions. When you're in full duplex mode (as you generally are), collisions are impossible since by definition both sides are allowed to transmit at the same time. Now your ethernet network remains stable at 100% utilization. And if the nic in the PC burns out, the rest of the network doesn't care.
Token ring is very sensitive to malfunctioning nics. A malfunctioning nic may drop the token, that is it may receive the token and then fail to transmit it to the next nic. That kills a token ring network dead until the admin wanders around with an analyzer and figures out which PC is at fault.
Suddenly the tables were turned. Token ring was an administrative headache and expensive to boot. Ethernet was simple, cheap and worked just as well.
Token ring died out except as an academic curiosity -- an interesting early answer to a problem that was eventually solved another way.
Only weird applications still need token ring (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had one customer for whom token ring on Shielded Twisted Pair wiring was the right choice even after Cat5 Ethernet cards were cheap - they had lots of Big Electrical Equipment, and the alternative would have been to do fiber, which was cost-prohibitive back then, plus they didn't really need high data rates.
Performance differences weren't really all that significant for the different technologies, except for obvious base-rate differences (100 Mbps >> 16 Mbps > 10 Mbps > 4 Mbps.) Even if they were, Full-Duplex Ethernet (which is pretty much universal these days if you use switches instead of hubs) doesn't have the same issues that half-duplex does.
Why Ethernet didn't work, the real story (Score:5, Interesting)
In theory, Ethernet on coax should be stable under heavy load. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn't, due to defective design of some widely used interface chips. Here's the actual story. See this note by Wes Irish at Xerox PARC [bilkent.edu.tr]
The worst device was the SEEQ 8003 chip, found in some Cisco and SGI devices. Due to an error in the design of its hardware state machine, it would turn on its transmitter for a few nanoseconds in the middle of an interframe gap. This noise caused other machines on the LAN to restart their interframe gap timers and ignore the next packet, if it followed closely enough. This happened even if the SEEQ chip was neither the sender or the receiver of the packets involved. So as soon as you plugged one of these things into a LAN, throughput went down, even if it wasn't doing anything. A network analyzer wouldn't even see the false collision; this was at too low a level.
This was tough to find. Wes Irish worked on the problem by arranging for both ends of Xerox PARC's main coax LAN to terminate in one office. Then he hooked up a LeCroy digital oscilloscope to both ends. Then he tapped into a machine with an Ethernet controller to bring out a signal when the problem was detected and trigger the oscilloscope. Then, when the problem occured, he had a copy of the entire packet as an analog waveform stored in the scope. This could then be printed with a thermal printer and gone over by hand.
Because he had the same signal from both ends of the wire, the wierd SEEQ interference mentioned above appeared time-shifted due to speed of light lag, making it clear that the interference was from a different node than the one that was supposed to be sending. You could measure the time shift and figure out from where on the cable the noise was being inserted. Which he did.
It took some convincing to get manufacturers to admit there was a problem. It helped that Wes was at Xerox PARC, where Ethernet was born. I went up there to see his work, and once I saw the waveforms, I was convinced. There was much faxing of waveform printouts for a few months, and some vendors were rather unhappy, but the problem got fixed.
So that's why.
No (Score:2)
Hmm (Score:2)
Token-Ring based LAN is dead. (Score:3, Interesting)
That does not mean that a token-ring based protocols are dead. A ring configuration is still a viable option, say, to connect multiple routers over large distances, say 50-100 km. But as a LAN, token ring is pretty much dead.
An interesting titbit. I was working for IBM at that time (a few years ago, around 2000), a highly confidential message came from the top: "IBM is migrating internally from Token-Ring to Ethernet.". And then I knew Token-Ring was *really* dead.
Are you kidding? (Score:2, Funny)
However, LAN: A Dog - now that's a book I can identify with.
Outdated school book (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Outdated school book (Score:2)
Seriously, has TR _ever_ been more widely used than Ethernet?
Re:Outdated school book (Score:2)
Still selling... (Score:2)
Not even at IBM... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Token Ring products were withdrawn from marketing a couple of years ago, so no more MAU's and Concentrators or NICs can be purchased, at least not from IBM. However, the products are still supported, and not uncommon in mainframe installations.
At IBM we finished the Ethernet migration a couple of years ago. The thing that struck me the most about the migration was how converting from 14Mbps TR cable to 100Mbps Ethernet cable involved nothing more than inserting an adapter cube into the connector on each end of the building cabling. One of the primary features of the "IBM Cabling System" was that it could be adapted to many different cable types by just using adapters; coax, twinax, UTP, etc. To accomplish this feat, it was actually shielded, as opposed to unshielded CAT3/5, etc. This made it hideously over-specc'd for the original common use of TR. The cabling was designed so you could run it past just about anything and not have to worry about interference, cross-talk, etc. You could even get cable that had some UTP pairs stuffed between the shielding and the sheath so you could run your phone and data cabling using the same cable run.
The drawback was that the cabling was bulky, expensive, and difficult to work with.
Making cable that will actually work at over six times it's origninal intended speed while being more than a bit difficult to work with is an interesting example of Enterprise-quality engineering philosophy at IBM from the '80s.
SirWired
Re:Not even at IBM... (Score:2)
Re:Not even at IBM... (Score:2)
ether2 switchless ethernet (Score:2)
-Ack
You think that's bad? (Score:2)
The company I worked at for a year during my industry placement had a combination of standard 100Mb ethernet, and Decnet. Yes, I kid you not, Decnet. There was a MicroVAX in the server room with a ton of parallel lines coming out of the board which snaked off to the desks of various engineers (as in metal) who had dumb terminals wired up to them. Yes, with greenscreens.
It gets worse. By some horrible horrible technical voodoo, the MicroVAX was connected (by a single TR system) to the main compan
Re: (Score:2)
Token Ring LAN (Score:5, Funny)
Token Ring LAN, Token Ring LAN
Doing the things a token ring can
How does it work?
It's not important
Token Ring LAN
Is it a drag or is it a waste?
When it's installed
Does it get replaced?
Or does that admin get axed instead?
Nobody cares
Token Ring LAN
Ethernet LAN, Ethernet LAN
Ethernet LAN hates Token Ring LAN
They have a fight
Ethernet wins
Ethernet LAN
Internet WAN, Internet WAN
Size of the entire Internet, man
Usually kind to the smaller LAN
Internet WAN
It's got a link with PPP band,
A T1 band, and an OC3 band
And when they're together it's a happy LAN
Powerful WAN, Internet WAN
Workgroups LAN, Workgroups LAN
Formerly known as MS LANMAN
Lives its life in a garbage can
Workgroups LAN
Is it depressed or is it a mess?
Does it feel totally worthless?
Who came up with Workgroups LAN?
Degraded LAN, Workgroups LAN
Ethernet LAN, Ethernet LAN
Ethernet LAN hates Token Ring LAN
They have a fight
Ethernet wins
Ethernet LAN
Re:Token Ring LAN (Score:2)
Robotics (Score:2)
Its dead (Score:2)
I've HEARD of banks using them, but all the banks I've visited use Dell or IBM PC workstations with AIX or AS/400 servers using 100mbit ethernet. TR died for the same reasons ATM died for smaller locations... its way to complex to make. An ethernet hub is $10 and a gigabit ethernet hub is under $50. Theyre also well standardized compared to TR and others...
Airplane Usage (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently went to a company... (Score:2)
The company still had a big IBM mainframe running batches that people had to fill from a green CRT. They still used Token Ring in their machine environment, just because they didn't change it since it works great. They are thinking about decentralizing for security reasons though.
I heard different researches still use them as you can calculate the latency and round-trip and for some tests that is really important.
Real men... (Score:2)
Real men don't use cable you can coil... That's why I stick with good old 10B5 thick ethernet.
Re: (Score:2)
Royal Bank of Canada (Score:2)
Token Ring v. Demand Priority (Score:2)
Re:Token Ring v. Demand Priority (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Back in College (Score:2)
Re:TK use vs. FDDI use (Score:2)
Er... how? TR only has standard for twisted pair and fiber.
Re:TK use vs. FDDI use (Score:2)
>Er... how? TR only has standard for twisted pair and fiber.
Poster before you might be confusing Token Ring with ARCnet.
Re:TK use vs. FDDI use (Score:2)