[HECnet] DECnet et al

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2011-07-17 20.22, Peter Lothberg wrote:
But HECnet as a whole is not connected to this segment...

    I thought the majority of it was...     There are a few people, like me, who
are using Multinet but only a few cases.   I thought pretty much everything
was bridged.

    [FWIW, Multinet tunnels a point-to-point DECnet link, essentially like a
DDCMP link, over UDP.   For that you really need to have a router at either
end to pass traffic for other machines on either LAN.]

Bob


Johnny,

If you can make a DECnet router, (l3...) or make the Internet look like point-to-point
(ddcmp) links, it would work 'better'. As sending all areas as 'rip
vectors' every second is not'usefull'.

Yes. The bridge is simple, but not really ideal. It causes a lot of traffic that would be better if we could restrict.

But for a router, we need to talk the DECnet routing packets, which I think might not be that bad, but then also route DECnet packets, which means much more cleverness. I'm afraid I definitely don't have time for all that.
But it would be nice. You could even be extra clever and only present one DECnet node with n interfaces, one for each endpoing that currently have a bridge. So it would seem like everyone had a connection to that router, but no direct connection to the other endpoints. So we'd have routing traffic running p-t-p to the virtual router, but no need to spread that traffic all over the earth, as is done today. Each end would still be running the bridge just like today, but the central hub would be rather different.

And I'm offline, as I only speak Multinet and Decnet in GRE... (and
takes for endpoints?)

Yeah. I know... I think you are not the only one not at all on the bridge, but I can't remember anyone else off hand.

	Johnny