Russian-made equipment. Part 3. qBRIDGE

    Once again, I was lucky enough to deal with a Russian piece of iron. The review will be very small, fact-finding.
    This time, the inverse multiplexer / converter from NSGate is qBRIDGE401 .
    They replaced several Mlink'am. Briefly about the technical specifications.

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    Iron


    A blue box with a height of one unit and a width of 25 cm can be installed in a 19 inch rack by screwing the ears to it. On board is a 4-port Ethernet switch, 4 E1 ports, a bunch of status indicators for these same ports, a switch for configuring the device, a console port and power connectors / connector. The device is made in a Soviet way simple and understandable. In addition to the name of the model, no design elements or identification marks and "excesses of any bad" were found on the surface. Power can be arranged both from a 220V network through an adapter, and from -48V. The indicators on the front panel show us: PWR : On when there is a supply voltage, LAN SPEED 1-4 : On when the Ethernet port is in 100 Mbps mode,

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    LAN FDX / COL 1-4 : Enabled when the Ethernet port is in duplex mode, blinks in case of collision when the Ethernet port is in half duplex mode,
    L AN LNK / ACT 1-4 : Enabled if the Ethernet port is connected, blinks during transmission / reception data,
    E1 CRC 1-4 : Enabled when receiving a CRC4 supercycle with CRC4 error from line E1,
    E1 RAL 1-4 : Enabled when a detected signal indicates a remote
    device alarm, including LOS (no reception signal), LOF (frame synchronization loss) ) AIS and a remote device,
    E1 1-4 LOF : loss Enabled when receiver E1 framing of cycles th
    clock signal FAS / NFAS (LOF, loss of frame).

    Software and Management

    I must say that the piece of iron is dumb. The converter has two options: with and without control. In the first case, we can connect to it through the DB9 port and then the switch is not used, in the second the port is not used, and all settings are limited by the position of the switches. There is no question of any remote control.
    Why do you have to abandon Mlink in favor of qBRIDGE? Because it has the ability to combine E1 channels to transmit Ethernet traffic. Mlink could not do this, and in fact was limited to 2Mb / s to the point (1.92 in fact). Thus, the total throughput using qBRIDGE can reach 7.68Mb / s.
    If one of the E1 channels drops, then Ethernet runs on the remaining ones. The converter automatically turns on the channel when reconnecting.
    The device supports QoS and VLAN. In the case of a managed device, the parameters can be configured.
    An uncontrolled device fell into our hands, but despite this, the console cable was included. Briefly about the configuration. The port number of the remote device must match the number on the local one. When making changes (using the switches), you must manually turn off the power. The purpose of the switches: From the 6th to the 8th, they are used to configure the synchronization source, the 5th turns the mode on and off, in which the data arriving at the E1 ports is returned to the same ports without changes,

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    4th is used to control the frame buffer. The maximum size is 4Mbit. When the switch is off, the entire buffer volume is used, when only a part is turned on (according to the documentation, 512 kbps by default).
    The remaining three are reserved and must be in the off position.

    Management through the console is limited to configuring the same parameters, plus switch ports, VLAN, and QoS. The settings are quite deep, but for lack of opportunity to test, I will not describe them.

    Laboratory testing has not yet revealed any problems.
    Soon the piece of iron will go to the front and replenish the ranks of our telecommunication equipment.

    <In the meantime, sad statistics are collected on Mlink'am and LANtastik. In the near future a small post about this>

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