[HECnet] Towards the Mouth of Madness....

[Jason Stevens]

Wow I haven't touched FDDI since ... 2001?   There was some AT&T X11 NCR monster (something like a 32way pentium running SYSVr4) serving out all these tn3270 sessions to Windows NT 4.0 & Hummingbird eXceede....    Because AT&T was just plain weird with their mainframe... You couldn't get a SNA LU6.2 or 3270 session from them, but instead tn3270 that was even more so  quirky  regarding it's timing (for those who have used cisco routers for local ack to fake out the constant chatter in SNA)...   Anyways the giant glorified PC was connected via FDDI to a cisco 7000.   The one day it went down, I just broke the ring, and made it a single  connection  and it came up.

Ugh it was such a disaster, it was almost a happy day when they rolled in with 8 way PIII's ... to run the same tn3270 thing.

While on these  grueling 3+ hour  phone calls with AT&T they actually hired someone that would run ping....

  

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 5:12 PM, Joe Ferraro <jferraro at gmail.com> wrote:

Off topic... I received a page, a few weeks prior, on a machine that was not pinging. Turns out, it was one of a few old NOVA class boxes we still have at my work,   using FDDI for connectivity. Fortunately, a disconnect / reconnect brought the ring back online; I was scared (and a bit excited in a strange way) for a few moments that I was going to have to do some extensive troubleshooting... FDDI still lives. 


On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 4:27 PM, H Vlems <hvlems at zonnet.nl> wrote:
Remember what I wrote: this happened nearly two decades ago.
IP is the protocol that survived and most people aren   t even aware what happened on local area networks before, say,1998.
I worked for Fuji, photosensitive films, paper and offset printing products.
Most of the IT equipment was made by DEC: PDP-11   s (/44, /84, /93, /24, /73 and /23), VAXes, an IBM mainframe (4081) and PC   s.
And lots of other gear, most of it in the research lab. A Motorola box that ran Motorola Unix, and an RS/6000 under AIX 2.4 (?).
The lingua franca was DECnet and LAT. No IP, though some PC   s used Novell and SNA over tokenring to make terminal emulation to the mainframe possible.
No IP.   Sounds weird in today   s world but DECnet eventually connected everything. We got a *very* early Cisco router that did level 1
DECnet routing between the corporate ethernet and the finance dept token ring. Another (DEC) box that routed DECnet over Datanet/1 (that   s X25 in Europe IIRC). The mainframe used an SNA/DECnet gateway (the big channel attached box).
The RS/6000 and the Motorola systems also ran DECnet, endnode only.
To make this a little interesting we ran the first FDDI network in the Netherlands.
Trouble shooting wasn   t always easy, especially if the SNA/DECnet gateway was involved!
Hans
  

Van: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] Namens Jason Stevens   Verzonden: dinsdag, juli 2011 21:10   Aan: hecnet at update.uu.se   Onderwerp: Re: [HECnet] Towards the Mouth of Madness....
  
AIX and decnet? now that'd be ... non conformist & fun!

Geen virus gevonden in dit bericht.   Gecontroleerd door AVG - www.avg.com   Versie: 10.0.1388 / Virusdatabase: 1516/3760 - datum van uitgifte: 07/12/11