JOSEPH@RED.RUTGERS.EDU.UUCP (03/26/87)
Rutgers University purchased its first Kinetics Fastpath Standalone about three weeks ago. We imported the 10/86 version of Kip to run on it and Cap 3.0 to run on our pyramid 90x. After installing the gateway we used the MPW MacTelnet of 2/20/87 to verify the gateway's correct operation. We were able to reach all of our hosts and TFTP worked ok. We then began installing cap and testing EFSD. We got it running and were about to announce the new functionality to our user community in general when we ran into the following snag: The Kbox seems to crash at random times and will not restart on power up. The box will sometimes run for 3-4 days and other times will crash after 12-16 hours. The 10/86 version of Kip would flood the appletalk network with packets when it crashed and would not answer pings on the Ethernet side. This week we have imported the new version of Kip and it also crashes. It does not seem to impact the Appletalk side the same way when it freaks out, but it also will not answer pings on the Ether side. When the gateway is crashed, the Kinetics PROMPT program can not find a gateway until I switch it off and back on again. Questions: 1) if the gateway is running, and I switch it off and back on, should it restart again all by itself? I assume it would just reload its routing tables via ATALKAD running on our PYRAMID. 2) If it should but does not, is there any way I can diagnose whether the problem is in hardware (the Kbox) or software? 3) Has anyone else experienced this problem? How stable is this software? Should I expect it to run bug free for weeks or is this typical performance? 4) We are running MacServe 2.2 on this network. Could it be interacting? Has anyone else put a gateway on a MacServe Appletalk network? Are there known incompatabilities? 5) MacTelnet seems to take an awfully long time to realize that the gateway is down. It will often sit for 3-5 minutes before complaining that it cannot get an IP address from the gateway. Is there any way to shorten this wait? Thank you for your help. Seymour Joseph Systems programmer/Microcomputers P.S. Is the terminal emulation in MacTelnet being worked on? Its vt100 is really marginal. It does not seem to do upscrolls properly. (Enter Emacs, type two lines, move the cursor back to the beginning of the first and then type two control-K's. This should kill the first line and then kill the line break and move the second line up. You never see the second line move. If you do a Control-L you will see that the command did get executed.) -------
dk1z#@andrew.cmu.EDU.UUCP (03/26/87)
I'm sure that I'll be corrected on a few points, but here are my observations. 1) If you power off the gateway and bring it back up it should come up on its own. As I am paranoid, I tend to reload it by hand anyhow. 2) No informed answer. 3) I've had no stability problems and I've pounded on it pretty hard at times. From my experience, you should be able to count on it for weeks. 4) We do not have MacServe. We have had problems with Hayes InterBridges, though. 5) The timeout in MacTelenet (CMU/Columbia) is quite long. You can pick up the code from Columbia and change it, I believe. You can also talk to Stanford and pick up their version of Telenet which will soon have multiple connections and FTP. University of Illinois also has a multiple connection version with FTP. Stanford requires a license and $50 for the binary. I'm not sure about U.I. (You out there, Gaige?) 6) MacTelenet will probably not be getting many improvements. Mark Sherman worked on it to work with the new gateways and Charlie Kim has improved the TFTP handling and fixed a few bugs, but noone, as far as I know, is doing serious development on it. I take that back. We have a group of students who are working on designing and building a new interface for it but I have no time estimate on it. Stanford's version has two pages of scroll back and seems to be a good vt100 emulation. 7) Prompt frequently loses the Kinetics box. When I use Reset, the Kinetics box will reset, but Prompt will not find it. Power cycling always works. The Prompt screen is also totally useless and the configuration file drives me nuts. Having to encode the name and load file in hex is insane. If Kinetics would release the source, I'd be happy to upgrade it. If I had the time, I'd just write it from scratch, but I'm not that nuts, yet. Once I start handing boxes out to local administrators on campus I'm certain that I'm going to wish that I had rewritten it. -David Kovar