richard@pantor.UUCP (Richard Sargent) (09/08/89)
Hello out there, Our company is in an interesting situation: we have 5 geographically dispersed development sites (Toronto Ont., Syracuse NY, Shrewsbury NJ, Washington DC, and Seattle OR). 4 of these sites are PC oriented, running Novell NetWare, 1 site uses PC-NFS to connect to a Unix network, and one of the PC sites also has a couple VAX's, a Sun, an Apollo, some some other miscellaneous systems (most of which we don't need connected). Until recently, we were just 3 PC sites, one of which has a couple of VAX's, etc. And we only bothered with interconnecting between PC's. The one site talked to the VAX, when necessary, using simple terminal emulation software. The three sites communicated by running a dedicated "modem machine" which ran ProComm and a special/custom script. The modem machines would use regular dial lines and 9600 baud modems. We tried to schedule traffic for evening travel, unless it was needed sooner. This setup allowed us to send files to people at other sites from our individual workstations, over our local network, to the modem machine, over the phone line, to the remote site, and onto that end's network. Messy, but it works (sort of). Oh yes, we also use the modem machines to connect to UseNet news/mail feeds as well as to allow controlled dial-in access from people at their homes (i.e. check up on a long running job). Thus, the background. Now, the problem is that I don't have (yet) the experience to determine how to get these sites better connected. Better includes: economically, efficiently, and the rest of the gamut. Some options and notes I have made are: - we want a Novell network interconnect (on demand if we don't have a flat rate connection) - we want to have UUCP dial-out capability (on demand), and perhaps dial-in as well - We want plain dial-in and dial-out access (from local modems and to various BBS') - TCP/IP capability/compatibility - leased lines are an option - so is X.25 - we can also continue using regular phone lines - Novell provides "bridge" software, so do third party suppliers (so I would like to know more about this stuff) I would appreciate any and all helpful suggestions. "Are you nuts?!?" is not too helpful, unless you can follow it up with some alternative setups. Thanks to one and all. If there is interest, I will summarize the results. Assuming there are any :-( Richard Sargent Internet: richard@pantor.UUCP Systems Analyst UUCP: uunet!pantor!richard