[HECnet] Cisco DECnet routers and NML

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2020-05-04 19:39, Paul Koning wrote:
> 
> 
>> On May 4, 2020, at 1:35 AM, Tim Sneddon <tim at sneddon.id.au> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 1:57 AM Peter Lothberg <roll at stupi.com> wrote:
>> The Cisco DECnet router implementation does not speak "decnet management" as
>> we all knew. The way we are using them the tunnel end-points are on the Internet.
>>
>> Most of the information "missing" is actually available through the SNMP MIB,
>> so if we could agree on a common read-only community and publish the IP addresses
>> of those routers it would be possible to complete Paul's map..
>>
>> I would definitely be up for that. Maybe "hecnet-ro" for the community name?
>>
>> Regards, Tim.
> 
> Nice idea.  I can certainly do this.  To make it work, the node database would have to list IP addresses for MIB access.

I could certainly extend it with that...

> The fact that the Cisco routers don't speak NICE isn't always a problem.  If they have neighbors that do I still get the information, since I will chart a circuit even if only one of the two sides tells me about it.
> 
> If there is a chain of Cisco routers, the one in the middle of the chain wouldn't be mapped.  But, for example, an area served by a Cisco area router would be, since the mapper will try to talk to the nodes in the area and ask them what their view of the neighborhood looks like.

Well, that's not entirely enough. This means there are some major links 
that are not visible. Yes, you can see that there are a Cisco box here, 
and a Cisco box there, but you cannot see that they are connected.

> If all I did was a recursive graph walk the Cisco issue would be serious, but that's not what the code actually does.  A closer approximation is a "bulk mail" query sent to every node in Johnny's database.

:-)

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
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