[HECnet] Area 48.....

[Steve Davidson]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE 
[mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Cory Smelosky
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2013 14:13
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Area 48.....


On 7 Jan 2013, at 14:08, "Steve Davidson" <jeep at scshome.net> wrote:



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE
[mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of 
Paul_Koning at Dell.com
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2013 14:02
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Area 48.....


On Jan 7, 2013, at 1:52 PM, Ian McLaughlin wrote:

Wouldn't it be ironic if Hecnet ran out of addresses :)

Does anyone know what the largest DECnet deplayment was
duing the good old days?

The internal net at DEC was seriously out of addresses, 
though just 
like IP that's partly because the addressing scheme forced 
it to be 
somewhat sparse.   Still, there were certainly tens of thousands of 
nodes on it.

	paul



And let's not forget the hidden areas that DEC was forced to go
to...

Hidden areas? ;)

When DEC began to run out of node names/addresses (64512) they resorted
to something called hidden areas.   "Spitbrook Rd" (Nashua, NH) had nodes
that were in areas 61-63 that could not be seen beyond that facility.
Other sites, like the "The Mill" and "Parker Street" (Maynard, MA) also
reused those same addresses just not the node names.   If the node you
were on was in a hidden area then you had to do your own "routing" of
sorts to get the areas outside your facility.

As an example:   If I was on node FOO::, and FOO:: was in a hidden area,
and I wanted to send email to another site on node BAR:: then the DECnet
path might look something like this:

ROUTR1::BAR::<username>.   Where ROUTR1:: is a non-hidden area node
within my facility.

If the other end had the same issue then the chosen path might look
something like:

ROUTR2::FOO::DAVIDSON.   Where ROUTR2:: is a non-hidden area node within
the source facility.

This was referred to as PMR (Poor Mans Routing).   The concept was not
new because it had been used in previous versions of DECnet anyway, the
application was... Sort of...   HECnet has reserved area 63 for hidden
area nodes - to play with mostly.   I did some playing around last year.
If I can ever find my notes (from DEC days) about the whole setup I will
get back to playing some more with it. 

-Steve



-Steve