jessea@homecare.uucp (Jesse W. Asher) (04/12/91)
Our company is planning to hook up 7 remote sites up to our Sun Server
via digital point to point leased lines. My question comes from not
knowing enough about leased lines and about tcp/ip. What the phone
company proposes is DSUs connected to RS-232 ports at each of the
connection. Here is where I get lost. What should I run on either end?
Should I be running SLIP or PPP because the DSU is connected to an
RS-232 port? This doesn't seem right since many people out there are
using leased lines and are not using slip. Can anyone give me any
insights as to how _you_ would connect up two sites via leased lines
and how you would use tcp/ip to do it? Thanks much.
--
Jesse W. Asher NIC Handle: JA268 Phone: (901)386-5061
Health Sphere of America Inc.
5125 Elmore Rd., Suite 1, Memphis, TN 38134
UUCP: ...!banana!homecare!jesseabrian@telebit.com (Brian Lloyd) (04/14/91)
The problem with what to run on leased lines is an old one. Until PPP there simply was no standard. You ran what your router vendor gave you or you ran SLIP over an async link. Interoperability was limited to SLIP and because SLIP runs only on async links, you were limited to relatively slow speeds. Now you did not mention your hardware base so I can't comment too much. If you are trying to plug directly into an async serial port on a workstation, your speeds and options are limited. If you are establishing connections between routers that is a different story. You mention DSU's but you also mention RS-232. Usually when someone mentions a DSU he/she is running a 56Kbps or T1 synchronous link, the former being only marginally compatible with RS-232 (the official "top-speed" of RS-232 is 20Kbps but you can push it to 56bps) and the latter is totally incompatible with RS-232. All of that aside, I would consider adopting PPP as your point-to-point link protocol. It will run on either sync or async lines. PPP is supported by just about all of the router manufacturers for their synchronous serial links. It can also be used on asynchronous links too so it is a win all around. There are public domain versions of async PPP floating around so you can put a network together on a shoestring budget. Actually, you are going to be out of pocket quite a bit if you are talking about leased lines so you might as well do it right and get good routers to tie the whole thing together. Run sync PPP. -- Brian Lloyd, WB6RQN Telebit Corporation Network Systems Architect 1315 Chesapeake Terrace brian@napa.telebit.com Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1100 voice (408) 745-3103 FAX (408) 734-3333