Visara FEP-4600 Installation - Manual (Page 72)

Chapter 6. Ethernet Interface
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Duplicating a MAC address may cause one or both platforms to stay off the network, or
could cause other errors. The selection of this address is important.
If the FEP-4600 is replacing an existing 37x5 FEP or a Token Ring gateway product, the
downstream platforms that are communicating to that product, include in their
configurations the Token Ring address of that gateway/FEP product. To avoid having to
reconfigure all of those platforms, you may want to set the Ethernet address of the FEP-
4600 to that same address. You can not typically however, replace a Token Ring address
directly with the same address on an Ethernet card. This is due to Ethernet and Token
Ring designating the high order bit in complete opposition to each other. You must
therefore convert the existing Token Ring address to an Ethernet address using a bit
swapping algorithm. Refer to the section discussing ‘Bit-Swapping LAN Addresses’
below.
Selecting a MAC Address of ‘00:00:00:00:00:00’ will cause the Ethernet interface to use
the burned in address associated with the board itself. This is not recommended. Since
downstream platforms are configured for the MAC address of this unit, replacing the
board in the FEP-4600 would require reconfiguration of all downstream units. Any other
address entered will be used to override the burned in address. Traditionally, locally
administered Ethernet addresses use the format 02:00:xx:xx:xx:xx, where ‘x’ can be any
valid hex digit.
Note that you can not attach the FEP-4600 to the same Ethernet as the platform you are
replacing (or the same bridged Token Ring) and have them powered on at the same time
if you have duplicate addresses. (If you have a duplicate address situation, the FEP-4600
will stay off the Ethernet.) If you want to conduct tests where the FEP-4600 has the same
address as the platform it is replacing, you must ensure that both platforms are not
powered on and connected to the same network at the same time.
Media Type: For the media type option you can configure the Ethernet interface to auto
negotiate the media type and duplex (default) or you can preset it to one of the supported
speeds. The full set of values for this option are:
• Auto Negotiate
• 10 Mbit
• 100 Mbit
• 1 Gbit
Duplex Mode: This option indicates whether the Ethernet will be operating in Full
Duplex or Half Duplex mode. Note that 1 Gbps Ethernet always operates in Full Duplex
mode and if you set ‘Auto Negotiate’, the duplex option will be determined by the
negotiation.
Use Burnt in MAC Address: Checking this box will cause the card to display and use
the MAC address that was burned into the card by the manufacturer at the factory.
Response Timer T1: The value for this timer is an indication of how long the FEP-4600
should wait for an LLC response to a frame before attempting a retry. Commonly used
values would be: