Jeff Kell writes:

> An internally bridged 10/100 autosensing hub is the minimum cost to
>  have a mix of 10TX and 100TX on the same box...

>  Now if you get into a 10/100 switch, you're cooking with fire.  These
>  can freely intermix 10/100 ports while maintaining separate collision
>  domains per port.

That's clearly a caveat I should have written. However, it doesn't change the
basic moral. Presuming that you have all of the right equipment in place to
handle both 100Mbps and 10Mbps packets simultaneously, both forms of packets
will still occur on the same wire, and will have the same Chicago taxi cab
effect, if traffic becomes too intense for that LAN segment. All hardware
issues aside, that's really the limiting factor in all of this.

What Jeff says is absolutely true though: you absolutely don't want your 100TX
equipment to autonegotiate itself down to 10Mbps, in a least common
denominator fashion. That *will* slow the LAN down, guaranteed.

Nevertheless, the right equipment (hubs and switches) is available in every
networking catalog nowadays -- and may well (quite probably) already exist in
the customer's installed LAN, if they were at all careful in their selections.
If not, some of the equipment will have to be changed out.

I've recommended to other customers that they speak to Jeff about their
networking needs. And I've seriously recommended to Jeff that he begin
moonlighting as a network consultant. None of this is difficult or
particularly theoretically complex. The most important thing to do is to avoid
falling into all of the pitfalls. Only someone who has repeatedly done that in
real-life can provide really sound advice on what to do or what to avoid.

Wirt Atmar