mfurtney@dahlia.waterloo.edu (Michael Furtney) (03/15/90)
Hello, I currently work part time for a relatively small software development company called XCEL-Soft. We are based in Toronto, and our major product is a retail banking system that runs on a UNIX System V platform. Right now, we are in the midst of designing an 'Inter-Branch Banking' facility, and we are planning to make use of a Public Data Network (X25) to facilitate communications between branches. The software has been developed by us, for this project, and is now being tested on a local network. While this poses no problems from our point of view, it is felt by one of our major customers (A bank based in Jamaica), and by my employer, that a private network would be more secure, and offer better response times. We are looking at a solution of porting our retail banking system to BSD, and perhaps implementing a TCP/IP network of some kind that would facilitate inter-branch communication. We have various other reasons for switching to BSD, eg. the socket is a more robust IPC mechanism than is the standard System V IPC Message Queue routines, and our banking software relies heavily on this. But this article is not concerned with that... We are experienced with X25, and interfacing our banking software to other networks. (VISA/NET in particular) . This leaves us with a few questions, that I am sure many of the knowledgable gurus out there could answer for us : 1) Were could we write, or call, or FTP to obtain information concerning a) The purchase of 4.3BSD. b) Implementing a TCP/IP based network. In Particular: What types of communications medium are supported by TCP/IP. (With our PDN solution, each branch has a leased line to the network, is that possible with a TCP/IP solution?) These are broad, and rather vague questions, but any responses would be appreciated. All responses should be directed to : mfurtney@dahlia.waterloo.edu ..!watmath!watcgl!electro!grimm!mike (At home) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ..!watmath!looking!grimm!mike ..!watmath!watcgl!electro!grimm!mike