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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: you can connect more than 2 systems in FC without a switch. Just hop along from one TX to the next RX and build a ring. (It's called FC-AL, "Arbitrated Loop".) Works with fibre if you break the duplex cables apart to make simplex connections.

Obviously the entire thing fails if any node is powered off or has any kind of problem, but it's quite funny to do ;)

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Fiber in a ring? Now you've given me flashbacks of FDDI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_Distributed_Data_Interfa...).

The nice thing about FDDI was it could tolerate one node failure, because it has two rings. (Each node has two fiberoptic cables to both its neighbors.) If a node fails, its neighbors just send traffic the other direction.

> Obviously the entire thing fails if any node is powered off or has any kind of problem, but it's quite funny to do

Indeed it was funny enough to have that be a very common network topology back in the day. I've never had to investigate a token ring network failure but I can pretty much guarantee it was a frustrating exercise.

I was going to say that I thought token ring MAUs handled disconnected stations but then I read this (including the "setup aid" with an included battery) and now I'm not sure any more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_access_unit

(un)fortunately I didn't experience this period of network history first hand. :)

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