[HECnet] Italian DECnet...

[Johnny Billquist]

Hi, Gerry.

On 2013-05-08 01:58, G. wrote:
On Sat, 04 May 2013 17:56:51 +0200, you wrote:

To make a short follow up on this. I have not heard anything from our
Italian friends, and I think one big reason why this have never happened
is that there never seem to have been a big interest in it.

Sorry guys for my long silence on this topic.

No worry. It's not like it would signify the end of the world.

As far as I know, I'm the only one of the Italian DECnet reading and writing
here, and I'm just a spokesman (sort of). Lately, the whole Italian DECnet is
really just a couple of nodes and is seldom used. This is due to some people
moving from one location to another (even another country) and other people
loosing interest about it or having to devote their spare time to other tasks.
In the past year, for about six months someone of us had some Cisco gear as a
DECnet router, but it's since long gone and not expected to come back.

I don't think I've seen anyone else either, but they would be very welcome if they wanted to.
As for having other things to do, I can certainly understand that one...

Moreover (don't forget the spokesman thing), someone else once said he prefers
not joining our network to another because ours is an experimental one and he
wants to feel free to fiddle with nodes and addresses, and even switch online
unknown nodes, without fear of address clashes and such. Again, another one
with limited bandwidth said that all those "hello" packets coming in every 15
seconds from as many nodes as HECnet has would be too much for him (as a
matter of fact, we have raised networkwide our "hello timer" to 90 seconds).

This really should not need to be a big problem, anymore.

The broadcast traffic was certainly an issue with the bridge (which I recall having heard before, now that you mention it), but using either a VMS machine tunneling, or a Cisco box, this becomes a non-issue.
The same goes for nodes as well. If you are all in one area, it really isn't any different than today, unless you also occasionally setup other areas. Nodes within one area is totally at the discretion of the person(s) responsible for that area, and noone else.

And having one machine act as the router to the rest of HECnet means that traffic inside the area would be no different than today. And I would hope that atleast one person would have a suitable network connection, and a machine, to act as an area router...

The conclusion is that there is no common view about joining our DECnet (or
what remains of it) to HECnet, and every time I've submitted the question to
the other members there was always someone withdrawing or pushing against it.

That part I can't offer much help on. :-)
And I can understand that it's nice to be fully in control, and with less potential for conflicts and commitments. So I don't really feel like pushing hard either, but it would be nice if you could join.

A basic difference between other people joining HECnet and us, is that (as far
as I can understand) usually others are mostly individuals who then have not
to cope with different requirements and opinions, instead we are a group made
up of very different people, scattered all over Italy, from North to South.

We'll... We're scattered around the whole world. Don't make it easier...
However, I think that it works fairly well, for some reason. Maybe because we are not trying to make much of it, but enjoy the small things working.

All in all, I just became uncle and I have something else to think about! :)
For what is worth, I'm personally very grateful to all who think about us and
I'll continue to read and write here every time I can!

Hey! Congratulations. And whenever you feel like it, you can just request an area, and hook up with the rest of us. It would be fun. ;-)

	Johnny