[HECnet] Italian DECnet...

[G.]

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.

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.

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).

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.

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. 

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!

Bye, :)
G. (Bologna - Italy)