hedrick@topaz.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (10/19/86)
We are in the process of building a campus network for Rutgers. For fairly obvious reasons (at least I hope they are obvious to readers of this group), it is primarily IP based. I am finding it an increasing pain in the neck to provide for VMS users who want us to support DECnet among their machines. I understand their desire, since VMS has DECnet very well integrated. But it seems nearly impossible to support DECnet in a gateway, even when the gateway has been built to support PUP, XNS, IP, Chaos, and every other conceivable protocol. Anyway, it strikes me that the obvious solution would be to run DECnet on top of IP. I can even think of a way to do it. But I don't have enough time at the moment to implement it. Has anybody done this? [The way I would do it is to write a device driver that pretended to be a multi-line synchronous line controller. Inside it, there would be a table that associated one IP address with each supposed synchronous line. The driver would simply stick the right IP header in front of each message and send it out the Ethernet interface. This sounds like something a competent VMS hacker could do in a week, though I've been involved in enough things like this to know how misleading that can be.] I would probably be willing to pay, if somebody would like to do it for us.