[HECnet] Others DECnets

[Steve Davidson]

Ian,
  
Are you talking about hidden area support?   That is one of the reasons that I modified the bridge.   Area 63 in HECnet is hidden (sort of...).   At the moment it only exists at my end but...   It turns out it is a bit more complicated than I had ever imagined.   I did find some notes about how it was done in ZKO (Spitbrook Rd, Nashua, NH) but I'm a long way from making it actually happen.   One component involves two different copies of the databases - but that is only the beginning.
  
-Steve
  


From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Ian McLaughlin
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 18:43
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Others DECnets


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] On
Behalf Of Johnny Billquist
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 17:18
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Others DECnets

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

Johnny

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unpublished, so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                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol


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