[HECnet] Effects of Rogue Duplicate HECnet Node?

[Mark J. Blair]

I had a shower thought that I'd like to run down in order to better understand how DECnet routing works. Ok, I wasn't actually in the shower.

Let's say that my local DECnet is successfully hooked in to HECnet. For the sake of discussion, imagine I'm using PyDECnet to connect to my upstream node, and I don't have my own area number. That means that my PyDECnet node would be a level 1 router, right?

Now, imagine that I inadvertently bring up a system on my local ethernet with an uncoordinated DECnet node ID. Perhaps I booted some random RL02 pack in my VAX without remembering to unplug the ethernet cable, or booted a random disk image in SIMH with it connected to the TAP device. Just to make things exciting, let's say that the system comes up with a node ID that properly exists elsewhere in HECnet.

If the node ID happens to be in the same area that I'm properly in, does the adjacency detection find it and break things? What if it comes up with a node ID in a different area? Just how much trouble would this cause?

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/