Help!!!!

["Chris Strandt" <strandtc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm quite new to linux, and I'm between a rock and a hard place at the
moment.  I'd like to give a little background to setup what I'm try to do
here, so please bear with me.

I work for Northville Public Schools, in the Educational Technology Center.

In the last year we have added 90 nodes to our existing 16MB Token Ring
Network (all this is at our high school).  We are in the process of
upgrading a large part of our network.

Problem is about once a day our network freezes... and honestly, we can't
tell why. We then have to shut down over 120 computers, and reset our 3
Olicom TokenRing switches.  Even though we basically "reboot" our entire
ring, this doesn't always work... Today we had to do this 4 times (a major
pain considering that we are doing finals).

We have run LANalyzer (a Novell Diagnostic Software) to try and find any bad
token ring cards and so one, with no great headway.

The reason I'm posting on a Linux Mailing List... I want to setup a Linux
Router, and isolate a section of our network (our primary labs).

But I have never done this.  I have seen that Linux works great w/ Ethernet,
but have not seen a whole lot of TokenRing support.... does Linux support
TokenRing Cards (if so.. any specific ones?)

Secondly... does Linux support IPX RIP routing?  To do this, I will have to
create a separate Network "Segment" (network address)... right??

And also, I'll need to do IP RIP routing.  My problem is this.  The router
will not be routing from a clear cut Subnet to Subnet...it will be part of a
subnet to another part of a subnet to be exact.  And I'll have multiple
subnets on the same network segment (We have multiple internet connections
using different subnets).

I guess what I want to know... is this worth my time... and is it even
possible?  Would anyone be willing to help out.. I'm sorry I can't pay
anyone to do this at this time.

Does anyone actually know of a company that specializes in TokenRing??

-Chris Strandt