MADISON@CICGJ.RPI.EDU (Matt Madison) (07/22/87)
Paul Clayton discussed his problems with his DECnet/SNA gateway. A couple of points - the SNA DECSA is different from the others in that it has 1 Meg of memory instead of 512 K (there may be other differences as well). Also, you can find the Ethernet address of any DECSA without having to go through the entire Test sequence by (1) Starting the DECSA with the "Test" button out; (2) waiting for the flashing "8.8.8.8." on the LED's (which only takes a few seconds to appear); (3) pressing the "Test" button while the LED's are flashing. I found this out because of a problem that we were having with our DECnet/X.25 gateway: the software download to the box would never complete. None of the other devices that get software downloaded to them were having any problems at all, so we naturally thought it was a problem with the gateway; we called in Field Service to look at it. They tested it out very thoroughly (by the way, I wouldn't recommend stacking your DECSAs, since our FS guy had to remove the top of the box to get to some of the insides) and found something wrong with it that was totally unrelated. Anyway, we later discovered that sometimes it would download and sometimes it wouldn't...seems that there was this VAXstation running Ultrix on our Ethernet that was spitting out garbage like crazy over the net; the only box that couldn't handle the download with that much noise was the X.25 gateway. This was discovered completely by accident after several days of trying to eliminate traffic from our 20 or so other network nodes. ...And we still aren't using the X.25 gateway for anything. Matt Madison Systems Programmer Center for Interactive Computer Graphics Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York madison@cicgj.rpi.edu