dwight@timeinc.UUCP (Dwight Ernest) (08/03/85)
In article <344@timeinc.UUC>, following the receipt of many rumors of problems people were having with AT&T's 3BNet, I asked: > What exactly is the problem (are the problems) with 3BNET? Here is a sanitized (names removed) compendium of responses. ----- MAJOR SECURITY PROBLEMS!!!! Like file access (and remote command execution) is controlled soley by user id. If you have the same user id on two machines then it doesn't ask you for a password. Now, while that's a nice convenience, it's also a problem. It requires you to have everybody have accounts on all machines and all their accounts have the same user id. Otherwise people will have FULL access to other people's files. MAJOR FEATURE LACK!!!!!! All 3Bnet gains you over a uucp net is speed. If I have an ethernet I want remote logins, broadcasted packets keeping me informed about the status of remote machines. I want a more usable remote execution facility. Possibly even a distributed shell. Y'know. Those nice things that came with 4.2. BAD DOCUMENTATION!!!!! The documentation lies. Nuff said. ----- 3BNET is both hardware and software. It is important to keep them separate in your evaluations. Hardware: think of 3Bnet as the AT&T brand of Ethernet. Some of the 3Bnet cards have a mode where they support 18Mbps, and some of the specs quoted by AT&T for 3Bnet aren't quite as good as the official Ethernet specs (there is no good technical reason for this, but it makes it harder to get support. For example, ATTIS hates coax and doesn't want to install it; they have grudgingly agreed to support it but only within a single building.) There are two kinds of 3Bnet hardware: the 3B20 3 board set (which is also available on the 3B5) and the 3B2 1 board card (which will be out for the 5 soon, maybe already is.) The 3 board set is junk and should be avoided. (Lack of reliability, various requirements that all packets must be a multiple of 4 bytes, and the biggest legal Ethernet packet isn't.) The 1 board card is mostly OK but can't seem to talk to Interlan boards or to the Bridge CS/1, apparently because it uses a Seeq line driver instead of the corresponding Intel chip. Software: what is offered right now should be considered a prototype just to show that the hardware works. Why they are selling it as a product is beyond me. It is completely proprietary - not compatible with anything, and not documented. The only user interface command is nisend, which is sort of a combination of uux and uucp. It does spool the command, but I understand that if the remote machine doesn't respond within 20 minutes (e.g. it's down) it throws the command away. I'd be afraid to send mail with that. There is no remote login, no interactive IPC, no interactive remote execution. There will be a TCP/IP for 3Bnet out late this year, written by The Wollongong Group. Early indications are that it will be OK, but it may be expensive. It uses the device driver from 3Bnet, which is a shame because that driver can't handle more than one board, making a gateway impossible. ----- 3BNET is UUCP over Ethernet. To be more specific, hacked UUCP over hacked Ethernet. For instance, a 3B20 3BNET implementation will only accept one size of Ethernet packets properly (for efficiency of file transfers, they say: funny how none of the half dozen other vendors' implementations of Ethernet we use had to do this). This means that even at the network level, 3BNET is not interoperable with anything else. At the transport level, it's not *remotely* compatible with anything else. At the application level, it doesn't have remote login, not to mention remote procedure call or network file systems. While there are at least two widely used high-level protocol suites already out there (TCP/IP and XNS) and another coming along (the ISO suite), AT&T chose instead to make something which provides a fraction of the services and none of the interoperability. The one standard they did sort of use (Ethernet) they made non standard. Furthermore, 90+% of the AT&T reps don't know as much as the above pocket summary about the product, and can't tell you where to get information on it. ----- (1) No remote Logins (2) Spooled file transfer (3) cruddy software (4) This a preliminary networking sortware. AT&T will later release STARLAN and Wollogong is writing TCP/IP ----- We have a small 3bnet of 2 3b2/300 computers. My complaint is functionality. The software is easy to install and works reliably but you can't do much with it besides file transfer and VERY fast mail unless you want to hack low level code. The file transfer options are worse than uucp (no ~ logic for example). There should be a middle level interface for programmers (rather than having to worry about packetizing data etc). -----[end of summary]----- -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- --Dwight Ernest KA2CNN \ Usenet:...vax135!timeinc!dwight Time Inc. Edit./Prod. Tech. Grp., New York City Voice: (212) 554-5061 \ Compuserve: 70210,523 Telemail: DERNEST/TIMECOMDIV/TIMEINC \ MCI: DERNEST "The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Time Incorporated." -----------------------------------------------------------------------------