[HECnet] Others DECnets

[Johnny Billquist]

I think it makes sense to split out the different protocols in more detail.

I wouldn't mind allowing MOP to all places, however, LAT is something I prefer to be a little more cautious with (just as an example).

	Johnny

Steve Davidson wrote:
Testing has been delayed for the LAVc configuration until this weekend -
work has a habit of getting in the way of hobbies.
In my version, I continue to use the same bridge.conf file except that I
have added the following:
[mop]
[sca]
[last]
I did not want to force MOP or LAT on a site that only needed one of
them so I split them out.   This version has only one file with the
appropriate sites/areas included or commented out to keep things
cleaner/easier.   Current testing is with two other sites.   One is in the
US via the Internet, the other is here (multiple static IP addresses are
a wonderful thing).
I would be interested to see what may be the differences in my version
and the one you are using.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of gerry77 at mail.com
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 16:38
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: [HECnet] Others DECnets (was: Boot VAX from Alpha host
Infoserver?)
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either because it didn't yet exist or because it was still unpublished,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                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol