Richard:

The vendor supplied the hub with the mass spec so I'm fairly sure
they weren't thinking switched network as a requirement. The
computer on the mass spec itself is, I believe, a Motorola VME
based single board computer. No idea what kind of network
interface it has. The vendor refers to it as a "real time"
controller.
If they mean "real time" there may be some hairy timing issues
that are only now, after seven years, manifesting themselves.
I doubt that they tested the network under load.


Rick:

What's a "plain" 10BT switch? Everything I've seen over the last
several years have been 10/100 switches. The switch I'm thinking
of using is a 10/100BT switch with (they say) auto config of
speed, xover, and duplex.

Let me clarify, the downloading is going _from_ the Sun into the
cloud, mostly.

Typically, the Sun is talking to the mass spec, let's say, all the
time.
Sometimes to frequently someone(s) from a remote pc will connect
to the Sun to run an interactive shell session or transfer files.
That's
a day in the life of the mass spec's network.

CPU utilization and maybe a snoop/tcpdump study (gotta figure out
how to run snoop/tcpdump first, though).


regards,
eric