andrew@cs.strath.ac.uk (Andrew Watson) (04/26/91)
I have been given the task of investigating the possibility of networking MACs and SPARCs together. Certain applications I want to use are based on TCP/IP , eg. NCSA TelNet , while others use Ethertalk. What I am wondering is whether it is possible to run both types of application over the same Ethernet network without having to use a gateway?
oberman@ptavv.llnl.gov (04/29/91)
In article <6458@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk>, andrew@cs.strath.ac.uk (Andrew Watson) writes: > I have been given the task of investigating the possibility of networking > MACs and SPARCs together. Certain applications I want to use are based on > TCP/IP , eg. NCSA TelNet , while others use Ethertalk. What I am wondering > is whether it is possible to run both types of application over the same > Ethernet network without having to use a gateway? Sure, it's possible, but EtherTalk is not the most robust of protocols in a large environment. We have over 3000 Macs on our network all sharing a common backbone with DECnet, IP, and lots of other stuff. While most things livwe in peace, EtherTalk causes a lot of trouble when someone misconfigures a system. I guess you might say it's too trusting. As an example, recently someone brought up AppleTalk on a Sun Sparc and misconfigured it. It started sending out ZIP GetNetInfo Replys claiming the backbone was a bogus zone. Every system which booted while this was up believed it and could not connect to the remainder of the network. It took several hours to track this down and then every system that thought it was in the bogus zone had to be rebooted. Other configuration errors can cause Multicast storms, often in the 2000 frame/sec range. Not nice. But, assuming you can keep users from doing dumb things and yourself from making mistakes in setup, it works fine. If you can avoid the large backbone and route most of your traffic, you will most likely find things work pretty well. Since we have a huge bridged backbone with thousnads of nodes on it, we are pretty much a worst case scenerio. Also, try to avoid Phase 1 traffic. Phase 1 was designed for very small nets and does not scale nearly as well as Phase 2, which in turn still scales poorly. Phase 1 to Phase 2 transition routers are especially bad things. R. Kevin Oberman Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Internet: oberman@icdc.llnl.gov (415) 422-6955 Disclaimer: Don't take this too seriously. I just like to improve my typing and probably don't really know anything useful about anything. Especially anything gnu.
gundrum@svc.portal.com (04/30/91)
>I have been given the task of investigating the possibility of networking >MACs and SPARCs together. Certain applications I want to use are based on >TCP/IP , eg. NCSA TelNet , while others use Ethertalk. What I am wondering >is whether it is possible to run both types of application over the same >Ethernet network without having to use a gateway? No problem. You just have to watchout for bridges/routers. If you have any of these devices, they must be intelligent enough to pass both kinds of address packets. ~~~Eric -- _______________________________________________________________________ Any statements made by this account are strictly based on heresay and should be assumed to have no intelligence behind them. (No, that does not mean they have the approval of management.) gundrum@svc.portal.com