Frequently Asked Questions
about White Rabbit.
White Rabbit general questions
Q: What's the easiest way to start playing with White Rabbit?
For starting to use WR technology a WR starting kit is available. The manual you can find there shows clearly what is possible with just two PCIe plug-in cards. Later on you can expand your kit with a White Rabbit switch.
Q: How can I test White Rabbit switch equipment? Or can I buy some test equipments from your company?
A: CERN is not a company, but a publicly funded intergovernemental
organization. We develop the technology but don't produce the equipment,
we buy WR switches from commercial vendors. Anyone can produce a WR
switch as all the sources are on our
pages (just have a careful
look at the wiki, sub-projects, ets... )
For example, there is wiki page about the WR switch on which
you can find the companies that are involved in switch development and
the companies from which you can buy a WR switch (Commercial producers,
at the bottom). On the wiki page about SPEC
card (an example of WR Node)
you will find companies producing SPEC
cards.
Q: If I don’t participate in WR workshop meetings, is the presentation material available?
A: All we do is public. All information from the workshops is directly accessible.
White Rabbit technical questions
Q: Can I get links longer than 10 km?
If you want to build a larger distance network, you may want to know
that there are several meteorological institutes working on extending
the 10 km range. One may replace the standard SFP's by longer distance
ones (see Non-compliant SFP types), and there may
be ways of multiplexing specific wavelengths on a dark channel in a
Telecom network. Also light amplifiers may be used. See for example the
data of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and VSL at Users of WR
technology. At the moment of writing (April 2013) no links
longer than 16 km have been made though.
The NEAT-FT Workshop on Optical Networks for Accurate Time and
Frequency Transfer held in 2012 may
give you more ideas and you possibly can find partner institutes that
can help you with such a system.
See also Frequently Asked Questions about the White Rabbit switch
5 April 2013