Shipboard Network Layout

During the recent 93-94 WECOMA mid-life refit, extensive effort was put in into defining and laying out a shipwide LAN. New data cable access trays were run within the overheads throughout the labs, and a new climate controlled Electronics Lab (E-LAB) added to house permanent ship's computers, electronics, networking hardware, etc. ThinNet lines from a central HP Hub were run in the new data cable trays to various points throughout the ship, where they were terminated in convenient drop boxes in the ship's labs. Most of the thinnet cable is designated for scientific computing, but lines were also placed to service the E-LAB, ship's bridge, and stateroom areas. In the future, it may be desirable to provide a network drop in each stateroom.

Layout

The network is layed out something like this, with network drops labeled N1 through N9...

       ____________________________________________
      |                  (N5)                      |
      |(N7)                                    (N3)|
STATE |______                                      |_____ 
ROOMS  down  \           DRY LAB        (N4)        up   BRIDGE
 (N8)  ______ \                                     _____ (N2)
      |                                             
      |_________    ________________________   _____   ____
      |                                            |       |
      |                                            | E-LAB |
      |____              WET LAB                   | (N9)  |
           |(N1)                 (N6)              | (HUB) |
           |_______________________________________|_______|

N1 - in the wet-lab, in the overhead above the gear locker.
N2 - outside the bridge, in the overhead above the gyro.
N3 - above the forward dry-lab bench.
N4 - in the overhead above the CTD bench.
N5 - near the bathy rack and is dedicated to X terminal displays.
N6 - in the wet-lab, in the overhead near the stancion.
N7 - above the aft dry-lab bench.
N8 - in the overhead outside of stateroom 14.
N9 - in the electronics-lab.

N5 and N9 are reserved for permanent shipboard computing. Currently the X terminals snidely and dudley are connected to N5 and the workstation oldmanis connected to N9. It is verboten to hook scientific party computers up to N5 and N9!

Hardware

The network is centered around an HP 28692A ThinLAN Hub Plus.
An HP 28683A Fiber-Optic Tranciever links the HMSC fiber-optic cable to the ship's hub.
It uses standard thinnet coax with BNC connectors for networking throughout the ship.
Spare BNC T's, terminators, and cables are located in the bottom left desk drawer in the Electronics Lab.

Information is also available on Using the Shipboard Network.

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