Designing GP Clinical Systems

A brief resume. (by James Berry, Adastra)

• LAN = Local Area Network. This means directly connected, without
• complicated links from third parties.
• Peer to Peer is still a LAN, but whilst a conventional LAN (eg Novell) has a file server; peer to peer machines can read and write from each other (eg Windows 95). You can do both at the same time.

• The advantage of peer to peer is cost: very cheap (free in Windows 95's case), but Novell or conventional LAN is generally more resilient.
• You can lock the server away and no-body touches it.

• 10base2, thin ethernet, coax (all the same, just different names) is a
• single coaxial cable that runs along all the computers with terminators at the end. Advantage: quick & easy. Disadvantage: one cut in it brings down the whole network
  
• 10baseT, twisted pair, category 5, UTP all refer to another type of cabling. This is when you have cheaper cable spreading out in a "star" arrangement from a device called a hub. This is better because if one connection breaks, it's only that machine which is affected. ..and "hubs never break"

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  Addendum by me:
  

  100 Mbits vs 10 Mbits networking.

• When we have the pervasive network, we will all be swapping 100 Mbit/s like quantities of data.
  
• Until then, unless you are in a huge Practice, if you are limited by a network which can only move 10 million bits per second, your system is moving the wrong information.
• Nevertheless, since 10 Mbits and 100 Mbits (over reasonable distances) networks use the same UTP Cat 5 cabling, choose the latter if you recable.
• If you have co-axial Ethernet cable, and no problems with the 10 Mbits network, wait until you do before tearing it out. Either you will re-use the cable at home, or we will all be on thin clients connected by wireless networks by then. No rush
  James again:-
• Shielded twisted pair will probably be quite a bit more costly in installation terms. It's thicker, and not as bendy - so it is much more difficult to work with. It is rarely necessary.
• The reason that unshielded twisted pair is fine is that the pairs are twisted, effectively cancelling out any RF interference.