[HECnet] Others DECnets (was: Boot VAX from Alpha host Infoserver?)

[gerry77 at mail.com]

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either because it didn't yet exist or because it was still unpublished, so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.