[rescue] FDDI questions

[jwbirdsa at picarefy.com]

1) If the MIC connector is also known as the FDDI connector, then why do
most FDDI cards have SC connectors instead? And why are MIC-SC cables
so rare? It's easy to find MIC-MIC and MIC-ST, but only perhaps one place
in four that carries those also has MIC-SC. On the other hand, one of those
places (www.connectworld.net) has them for a damn good price, $40 for a
ten-meter cable...

2) Grumping aside, I'm looking forward to setting up an FDDI/CDDI ring.
I have a Cisco WS-C1100 workgroup stack with eight FDDI SAS MIC, eight CDDI,
and even a single DAS MIC option installed. Question: since FDDI is a loop
which passes into and out of each device it's attached to, it seems like it
should be possible to link two concentrators simply by connecting an
arbitrary port on one to an arbitrary port on the other -- the loop should
simply flow through both without any special effort, right? Or is there the
equivalent of MDI/MDIX, therefore requiring a crossover cable?

   (Actually, that raises a third question: why the heck did MDI/MDIX come
about, anyway? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to simply have one pinout
and all cables be crossover, so that anything could be connected to
anything else with any cable one happened to have sitting around? Or was it
intended to be a safety measure to keep idiots from connecting a hub to
itself?)

   --James B.