pwy@pyuxe.UUCP (04/10/87)
Recently AT&T announced UNIX Release 3.1. They also announced a seperate product known as NPACK. The 1/2 page announcement of NPACK states that it is a STREAMS based product that contains an Ethernet media driver for the 3B2 3BNET hardware and a NPACK STREAMS protocol module. The announcement goes on to say that NPACK has not been implemented as a standerd. It is a technology model for protocol and driver package development under STREAMS. It is not a complete runable program as other products are. It comes in source format. No documentation is included. I called up AT&T licensing (1-800-828-UNIX) to request additional information, the only additional information that they could give me was a list of the source files supplied with the tape. Can anuone give me a better description of NPACK? Does RFS run over it? Is it writtten to interface to the AT&T Transport provider? Dose it provied connection/connectionless oriented service? What levels of the ISO protocol model does it correspond to? Any word on performance? The information that AT&T has provided just isn't enough to justify the purchase of this product ($5,000). If it could support RFS and uucp on SYSV 3.0/3.1, it might be attractive since the binary sublicensing fees are resonable ($5,000 one time + $10 per copy). Any information would be appreciated. Peyton Yanchurak Bellcore Bell Communications Research bellcore!pyuxe!pwy 3 Corporate Place 201-699-5405 Piscataway, NJ 08854
cwd@cuae2.UUCP (04/12/87)
NPACK was developed so RFS could be developed. STARLAN development and RFS development were done in parallel. The RFS folks needed something to test their product with, so NPACK was developed. Yes, RFS does run over NPACK. My organization received NPACK as part of the SVR3 alpha site program and we still use it. It works but it is gross to build addresses for it. For example, you have to find your Ethernet address to build RFS addresses for the name servers. You must use "crash" to obtain it. Then you prepend the address with \x00000007 for general purpose listening service and with \x00000008 for terminal login service. In both cases, you append the address with 0000. For uucp service, you must translate this monster address into octets. You take each hex byte and build an octet. If you would like to insulate the world from this, you must build your own symbolic address translator. The real catch is that NPACK is not an official product. You pay for source so you can support it yourself. We have never found any drastic bugs in it, but you are on your own. If you have to have Ethernet now, it's your only choice. If you can wait a while longer, STREAMS TCP/IP will be available. This gives you RFS and UUCP as well as all of the nice things TCP/IP includes. Hope this helps. Chris Donahue AT&T Data Systems Div. Customer Systems Engineering