[HECnet] HECnet routing costs

[Mark Matlock]

Johnny,
   I have one question I’ve been meaning to ask about hello timers and listen timers. The default seems to to be 15 seconds hello and 40 seconds listen. But on MIM I have seen some other combinations like Hello 300 secs but the Listen varies from 608 to the default 40 (at least on IP-0-10)
All the values seem to work ok, but on my 30.1 node which is a real PDP-11, I’d like to use something closer to 300 and 600+ to reduce load and unneeded up and down messages due to my flakey ISP’s internet. 

What are your thoughts on this topic?

Thanks!
Mark

> On Jul 28, 2019, at 8:31 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> People, I have written a page about DECnet costs and HECnet costs, which I would recommend that anyone interested read through. It contains a bit of elaboration on how DECnet does routing, and gives some suggestions on how costs could be set on HECnet to make it perform better.
> 
> I have noticed over the years that sometimes we do get really silly routing decisions just because of how people set, or do not set costs. The page I've written is by no means perfect, nor are the suggestions in there. But feel free to come with feedback, or ignore it. But I am going to try and use this myself more properly from now on, and that means that if others don't, you probably are going to get more traffic through your nodes. Traffic that probably do not make sense that it passes through you, but I just feel that I prefer to try and make it work right from my point of view, and then just at least tell people how I worked my numbers out. If someone have a different idea, I'm open to changing my settings, but I will not try and do optimizations to achieve:
> a) Same paths for packets in both directions - DECnet explicitly does not do this.
> b) Specifically penalize one type of interface because of any subjective preference about that type of interface in general.
> 
> Oh - and the link to my writeup: http://mim.update.uu.se/costs.htm
> 
>  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