[HECnet] Others DECnets

[Johnny Billquist]

Hi.

Ian McLaughlin wrote:
Here's where I read about hidden areas:
http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/271

Hmm. Interesting article, although slightly wrong or imprecise perhaps.
What they refer to as "named objects" are actually numbered objects. Named objects are the ones which aren't predefined in any way, and are for random program communications.

For instance, MAIL is never refered to by a name, but instead by it's number, which is 27. All "well known services" have specific numbers assigned to them.

Basically, if you have a network like this:
ME => ROUTER => YOU
Where ME:: and YOU:: are in conflicting areas, and ROUTER:: is a level 1 router between two level 2 routers, you would get from me to you using:
ROUTER::YOU::
I haven't tried it, but it might be worth an experiment.

It's called poor mans routing (PMR), but I haven't seen it used for exactly that purpose before.
However, I doubt it can be solved that easily.

In the level 1 router in the middle, you cannot get access to all nodes on both sides, in case you have an overlap of areas on both sides.

However, as Steve is trying it, as a hidden area 63, it becomes possible. The level one router will only have one area 63 it knows about. And nodes inside that area 63 will not know of any other area 63.
So it should be doable.
He just needs to keep the physical networks separate, and it should just work.

	Johnny

Ian.
On 2009-12-03, at 3:50 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Hmm. Such a setup will at best be weird.

The level-1 router in the middle, how would it know which way to go when a packet to an area that exist on both sides?

So it would basically only be "useful" when both sides only wanted to talk to the node/area in the middle, and only from nodes for which there were no conflicts.

Or atleast that is my guess, since I haven't actually tried it.

Johnny

Ian McLaughlin wrote:
Maybe a bridge between the two?   I read that you can have level-2-router => level-1-router => level-2-router that will allow you to bridge two networks that have conflicting area numbers.
Ian.
On 2009-12-03, at 3:38 PM, Steve Davidson wrote:
What Johnny said... :-)

-Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE <mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> <mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Johnny Billquist
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 17:18
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE <mailto:hecnet at Update.UU.SE> <mailto:hecnet at Update.UU.SE>
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Others DECnets

So, when are you finally going to join HECnet? :-)

Johnny

gerry77 at mail.com <mailto:gerry77 at mail.com> <mailto:gerry77 at mail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:56:39 -0500, you wrote:

My version splits out LAT from MOP, adds SCA (LAVc) and LAST
(InfoServer).   The LAT/MOP split has been verified to work.   LAVc
support is being tested now.   The LAST support testing is pending.

I'll take advantage of this message to say that here in this mailing
list
I'm a little bit like an impostor, because in truth I'm not a member
of
HECnet, but of another Hobbyist DECnet based in Italy. :-P

We are now running a quite modified version of Johnny's bridge: we
departed
from his project because some of us have connection and bandwidth
issues
that prevent the development of a strictly star-topology network as
required
by the HECnet bridge. We started experimenting many years ago (in the
2002-2004 timeframe) with Multinet and TCPware tunnels but were not
happy
with that solution because many of us had (and some still have)
dynamic IP
addresses which forced a tunnel recofiguration at every address
change!

At the time, we already did know about HECnet but not about the
bridge,
either because it didn't yet exist or because it was still
unpublished, so
we were forced to abandon out dreams of a DECnet of ours.

About three years ago, in the first days of december 2006, we learnt
about
the bridge and started again our experiments, but we soon understood
that we
were in need of some changes (among other things we had some nasty
packet
loops in the first days), so we asked to Johnny the permission to
modify his
work and here we go: our network is nominally made up of about 30
nodes, all
in the same area, but only three to four are online 24/7, and has a
full
mesh topology, that is every bridge is connected to every other bridge
(but
we later added a feature that allows for mixed topology networks).

If someone is interested in the full feature list and other details,
such as
some DECnet tuning we needed, s/he can contact me off list. :-)

Going back to the original topic, we choose to keep LAT and MOP
together,
and added LAST to the same group of protocols (but we renamed the
.conf
section from [lat] to [lan]). Instead, we didn't ever consider
transporting
SCA across the Internet because it's too much a time-sensitive
protocol and
would be probably almost useless, at least here. Did you succeeded,
Steve,
in keeping on quorum a cluster across the bridge and the Internet?

Cheers,
G.



-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se <mailto:bqt at softjar.se> <mailto:bqt at softjar.se>                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol


---
Filter service subscribers can train this email as spam or not-spam here:     http://my.email-as.net/spamham/cgi-bin/learn.pl?messageid=36125A5AE06511DE8B9D6E8E93ED0201


-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se <mailto:bqt at softjar.se>                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol


---
Filter service subscribers can train this email as spam or not-spam here:     http://my.email-as.net/spamham/cgi-bin/learn.pl?messageid=A6EBD192E06611DEAB25708093ED0201