Part Number: 53F5501. Has 20 Token Ring ports. Also has 9-pin and 25-pin ports in back of unit. 

Peter Fires Back- 
   This is no MAU - it's a LAM ... Lobe Access Module - and 1/4th of a 8230 MAU installation. You need the 8230 base (controller) unit to use the LAMs. The LAMs come either in 20 x ICS or 20 x RJ-45. They can be used in mixed configurations. 

Using the IBM 8228 Setup Aid FRU P/N 6091004 (69X8369) 
 

Use the IBM 8228 Setup Aid after you have installed the 8228 and before you connect any cables to it. The aid should never be used when the network is operating ! 

  1. Before you begin make sure no cables are connected to the 8228. If a cable bracket has been installed on the 8228, remove it. 

  2. Insert the aid into receptacle 1 of the 8228. The yellow stripe should be aligned with the edge of the receptacle to ensure that the aid is firmly seated. The light will glow brightly when the aid is initially inserted and will gradually dim when the aid is firmly seated in the receptacle. 
     If the light does not glow brightly when you insert the Setup Aid, remove  the srew from the aid and replace the battery. If the light still does not glow brightly after you have replaced the battery, try another Setup Aid. 

  3. Leave the aid in the receptacle for four seconds after the light has gone out (Ed. Wait to hear the "click" when the relay is energized). Remove the aid from the receptacle and insert it into the next receptacle.  The  yellow stripe should be aligned with the edge of the receptacle to ensure that the aid is firmly seated. Go to the next receptacle and repeat this step until you have set each receptacle, 1 through 8. 

  4. When you have set receptacle 8, insert the aid into the RI receptacle for four seconds. The light should glow brightly while the aid is in the receptacle. If the light does not come on or goes out while the aid is connected to the receptacle, then  the 8228 must be replaced. 

Setup Aid Uses
  The relays in the 8228 are very sensitive. Most 8228s fail to operate properly when they have been relocated ... on the bottom of a box and / or hardly dropped somewhere. 
   This "8228 setup / testing tool" *must* be used on any of the 8 data-station ports once before using the MAU, to "prime" test the relays and re-align them after transportation. I got all my MAU from customers that claim these were defective ... and all of them did fine after treatment with the "setup /testing tool". (Guess I have the original installation instruction somewhere around here ... If I find it I'll make a PDF from it.) 

Peter has a flashback and says:
   Solder two 470 Ohms resistors diagonally across a Sub-D 9 male plug. 1 - 6 and 5 - 9. That's exactly the layout of the "testing dongle" used for the TR diags. You could even fake out a server with that, which otherwise would come up with a "lobe error" when not connected to a MAU.

However: all these "8228-noises" are of pretty low level. You hear it ... hmm ... quite well when you are sitting close to the 8228. If one or more machines are currently running you will have some problems noticing the clicks and clacks. 

Oorts
   The advantage of the passive MAU is its simplicity. It contains a relay for each workstation port, which is opened through a "phantom voltage" (DC-overlay on the data-wires) and has two special ports "Ring In (RI)" and "Ring Out (RO)", which are used to daisy-chain multiple MAU up to 240 user stations. 
   You don't need a "token server" for either IBM Token Ring or FDDI.  Both of them have protocols built into the network interface cards that start the token and reconfigure the network when stations are added or removed. 
   Neither type goes down when a station is disconnected.  The MAU closes the circuit when it detects loss of connection, unless of course there's something wrong with the MAU.  When that happens the network cards reconfigure the ring in a few milliseconds and you never notice that it was down briefly. 
   With IBM Token Ring, if the network is large enough to require two MAUs, then if one of the connections from MAU to MAU is broken the MAUs can reconfigure to run on the remaining cable (MAUs are always connected to each other with two cables). 
   With FDDI, the ring can be configured as two rings with separate tokens, one going around the ring in one direction and the other in the other.  If there is a break anywhere, the ring can reconfigure and keep running. 
   To connect Ethernet and Token Ring you need a router--the router extracts data from Token Ring frames and reencapsulates it into Ethernet frames.  The type of network that can connect to Token Ring without a router is 100VG, which is designed for the purpose. 

Direct Cable Connection?
   Unlike connecting two BNC netcards, you can't connect two TR cards together without a hub (apocryphal tales of a magic cable and software are unfortunately just that AT THIS TIME). The main problem is two-fold: 1.) the adapter detects the opening of the ring-insertion relay and 2.) on the "open adapter command" the communication (insertation) into the ring must be finished within a certain period of time. 
   A direct cable connection does not supply the required change of current flow in the DC-phantom voltage line and to manage simultanously starting the ring communication on two different PCs *within* the time-limit is more than unlikely. 

Tales of Direct Connection
From Terry King
   Peter, back when I was at IBM in Vermont there was some internal software you could use to make two token-ring cards talk to each other without a MAU. Somebody must have done this outside IBM??? 

Peter's Response- 
As I wrote earlier in this relation (but not in this thread): there were rumours about such a tool - and corresponding to a team-mate "We had that back in 1990 or so ... required a particular cable with 2 resistors ..." but disk and cable have (of course !) gone. 
   Funny fact: we once had this software in the company (back in 1990 or so). Someone brought it there and we had a "magic cable" with a little black box in the middle, which might have contained some resistors and condensors - but no relay. 

On demand I got told that it works this way: 
- connect the two computer with that "magical" cable 
- start computer #1 ... will come up and "start the ring" 
- start computer #2 ... will complain about not being able to insert in the ring 
- start the "magical" software, which will *force* the TR-adapter to open and insert in the ring 

   The normal opening requires to receive the "relay opened" sense signal (change of current flow in the two wires for the +5V phantom voltage when the relay opens), then trying to read the passing token (if ring-speed matches ! - or Autosense the ring speed before), then open the adapter and copy the token informations and pass the token to the next station (or copy the data from it ..). This procedure must have finished within a "time-out" limit. If the opening / inserting fails an error-code is displayed. 
   The problem is to detect the "ring opened" flow-change with the MAU missing ... while this cannot be detected the follow-up inserting will not be started. The software only opens the adapter without waiting for the "ring opened" signal. 
   I'm still trying to get more informations about that. In case I find something ... I will tell. 

Oops! Pulling the plug...
Hi Greg ! 
>Peter, if you have a smart MAU you are probably right but we have crashed a lot of grocery stores by pulling the wrong plug using an 8228! I always told my techs to never pull the PC end before they pulled the "IBM plug" and we stayed out of trouble. 

   Err ... ahem ... My home-network bases on an 8228 ... and occasionally I ripped out the Sub-D plug at the adaptercard of a running machine. The station relay in the 8228 makes "clack" (closing - opposed to the "click" it switches on) - and nothing else happened. I was just backing up another machine over the net to a tape on a third active machine ... the machine I disrupted from the net however spit out a network error (logically). The rest of the net stayed stable. 
   You might come into troubled water if you only yank out the Sub-D *partially* and the +5V phantom voltage is still present - which keeps the station relay up ... in this case the transmitter / receiver lines might be interrupted and the Token gets lost ... and if this machine accidently was your "active token monitor" (the first station that sets the inital Token) it might cause the other stations going into idle (that "tick - tick - tick" under DOS-Lan) or cause a beakoning condition 
while other active ring monitors try to substitute the lost Token. This happens occasionally in my network when I pull the PCMCIA TR-card from my Laptop in an absent-minded state before powering the machine down.... :-) 

First of all: Token-Ring is *not* a serial port. It is ... Token-Ring :-) Second: you need a 'sort of' hub. In IBM technoslovakian this thing is called "Multistation Access Unit" (MAU) ... and is a bit expensive if you take an original MAU. 

The IBM passive MAU is the 8228 Model 001. It has 10 ports, 8 of them are for user-stations, 1 is called Ring In, 1 is called Ring Out. These 2 are for cascading mutiple MAU up to 240 stations. 

        A typical IBM 8228 Multistation Access Unit (MAU) 

    IN      1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8     OUT
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
|o +--+   +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+   +--+ o|
|  |[]|   |[]|  |[]|  |[]|  |[]|  |[]|  |[]|  |[]|  |[]|   |[]|  |
|o +--+   +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+   +--+ o|
+----------------------------------------------------------------+

   From                                                     To
  another           8 connectors for stations             another
   8228                                                    8228
 

   The original 8228 has connectors of IBM Cabling System (ICS) and use a very unfamiliar plug, which is called 'Hermaphrodite Plug' and is plug and socket as well. There are however compatible MAU available from i.e. AMP, which use RJ-45 connectors. The typical IBM Token-Ring cable has a 9 pin Sub-D plug on the adapters end and an ICS-plug on the MAU end. The cable can be extended very easy using another cable with ICS-plugs on both ends. The maximum cable length between MAU and station can be 300 feet at 4MB/s and 150 feet at 16MB/s. 
   One *can* create an own cable using shielded twisted pair cables like used on telephone lines, if the length between adapter and MAU does not exceed 60 feet. (That's what I often did !) - the ICS plugs are available separately and are very easy to install with only a larger plier to press 
in the self-cutting cable connector. Takes about 2 minutes with some experience. 
   An IBM Token-Ring cabling consist out of 2 pairs of wires, which create a system of 2 'rings' - one main data ring and an additional backup ring. The topology is a star (the MAU in the center and the stations connecting with a single cable to it), the logical architecture is of course a ring. Each station inserts into this ring without disturbing data-traffic to the other stations over the MAU. Token-Ring is -other than Ethernet- a collision-free transmission and a failure in a single station or cable will not course larger segments to crash. 
   There are 2 different TR-systems out: the 4MB/s and the 16MB/s Token-Ring. If the cards have a round green decal at the rear bracket with 16/4 printed on it then these are the adapters which support both speeds. But you will have to decide which speed you use - either 4 or 16. An adapter supporting only 4MB/s or set to 4MB/s cannot work in a 16MB/s-net and other way round. 
   It is very easy to setup a small network under WfW 3.11, using the drivers coming with WfW on the older standard MCA TR-adapters. You may have a dedicated server but must not have one neccessarily. If you share only ressources like disks or printers the Peer-To-Peer services will do. It will of course work with Win95 as well, but I would not recommend Win95 for the old Mod. 70s. A coexistance between WfW-3.11 and Win95 stations is possible. My personal Token-Ring network in my home-office consists out of an IBM 8228, an 8595 Server running under Win95, 2 Win95 workstations (Compaq LTE-5380 and IBM 9556-0BA) and 2 WfW-3.11 workstations (PS/VP and Mod. 80-A31). Copying of data among these machines works fine with no problems at 16MB/s.