Show Goers Glimpse Home Page

Last week, the Las Vegas Convention Center was ablaze with activity as an estimated 60,000 attendees crammed the aisles of Networld+Interop (N+I).The Patton "Away Team" was there too, showing off our new World Wide Web Home Page to passing show goers. Piping the Home Page On-Linefrom our Web server on the East Coast to a 486 PC at Patton's booth was no small feat, and several Patton LAN products were used in the process.Here's how we did it from a hardware perspective (looking at the software involved would take a separate article!):

How the West was Run
The easy part was actually making the link between our West Coast booth and our East Coast Web server. Every booth at N+I had access to theInteropNet, a complex Network with 300 miles of cable running throughout the Convention Center. Our connection took the form of a single Ethernet10BaseT link. Since the InteropNet provided Internet access, bringing a SLIP/PPP connection as far as our booth was fairly routine. The difficult partwas connecting our "plain vanilla" 486 PC to the Ethernet, since our PC had only a standard RS-232 serial port and no Ethernet card. This is where anumber of Patton products came in handy. The 10BaseT cable was plugged into a Model 2100 Transceiver, which was connected to the rear AUI portof a Model 2108 10BaseT hub. All the diagnostics gave us a good indication of link status. A 10BaseT link then ran to a Xyplex Maxserver 1620RS-232 terminal server, which presented an RS-232 connection to one of two Model 1018 SLIP/PPP short haul rack cards, residing in a compact2-slot cluster box. From the rack card, a twisted pair link was passed to a miniature self-powered Model 1018 plugged into the RS-232 serial port ofthe PC. The 57.6 Kbps data rate and unique flow control capabilities of the Model 1018s gave attendees excellent response times while exploringPatton's Home Page. Ah, if only we could have wired home the all-night buffets!