[HECnet] Circuit costs (again!)

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-01-25 18:08, Robert Armstrong wrote:
>> Paul_Koning  (Paul_Koning at Dell.com) wrote:
>> just setting all costs to the same number would not be all that horrible,
> either
>
>    The effect of this would be to make DECnet prefer the route with the least
> number of hops.  That makes a lot of sense to me and I would absolutely
> agree, BUT there's a problem...

Yes, this would in theory end up using the least number of hops, but 
that would depend on everyone else also setting the same equal cost on 
all their circuits, otherwise the bets are still off.

>    The problem is the HECnet bridge program.  The bridge effectively makes
> everything adjacent to everything else, even though the actual communication
> goes thru psilo.  Thus things look to DECnet like they're only one hop away
> when in reality they're at least two.
>
>    The consequence of this is that two machines which both have a connection
> via the bridge and which have a direct point-to-point link between them
> (e.g. Multinet) will sometimes decide to talk via the bridge and will ignore
> the direct link.  At least for my part, that not the behavior I want.

On the other hand, the traffic passes through a lot less inside your VMS 
box... Most of the network processing at psilo is done by hardware, and 
depending on what you are using at your local end to run the bridge is 
the same thing, so in fact it might very well be faster than the 
Multinet tunnel...

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol