roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (07/13/88)
After deciding that Ungermann-Bass's prices are out of sight, I've
been looking at an ACC model 4030 ethernet bridge. It's got some amount of
packet filtering and can run at 56/64kbps (or 112/128kbps with twin serial
lines). Does anybody have any experience with these? From the literature
they look to be a nice product and at just under $5k, they're about half the
price of the U/B gear. Granted, the U/B datalink bridges can run at much
higher speeds (up to T1), but we probably won't have a need for more than
56kbps.
If I understand things right, the bridge listens on both ethernets
and by looking at the source addresses learns which ethernet addresses are
on which side of the bridge. If a packet on one net has a destination
address of X and the bridge has already seen a packet on that net with X as
the source address, it doesn't forward the packet to the other net. You
can also program in some number (60?) of specific addresses to filter out.
I've heard the term "brouter" refering to a hybrid bridge-router. Is this
kind of filtering bridge what people mean when they say brouter, or is
there yet another kind of beast which gets that name?
--
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
"The connector is the network"donegan@stanton.TCC.COM (Steven P. Donegan) (07/19/88)
At Western Digital I have used (and are still using): Vitalink Translan I Bridge Communications IB/3 ACC 4030 Remote bridges. All function well, have been very reliable and all come with network management software. After using these bridges for quite a while I will suggest that the basic rule of thumb for bridges (transparent MAC level) at my site is: 128k or less inter-bridge link - use ACC T1 or faster use Bridge Communications IB/3 I do not suggest using the Translan I at all. We have converted all of ours to IB/3 units (The Translan I was based on Bridge's hardware and Vitalink software thus posed a severe support problem from Vitalink). If anyone else out there knows of better cost/performance units I'd appreciate some mail. This includes vendors :-) -- Steven P. Donegan These opinions are given on MY time, not Sr. Telecommunications Analyst Western Digital's Western Digital Corp. stanton!donegan || donegan@stanton.TCC.COM || donegan%stanton@tcc.com