ash@omega.UUCP (Andrew Hardie) (04/16/91)
There was some traffic on the net a month or so ago about Novell 802.3 packets (datagrams, I think, to be accurate), with the comment that these, to *really* be OSI conformant, should have inside them an 802.3 header and a SNAP field. The penny only dropped on me about this one after reading something this week. Does this mean that Novell's "OSI Support" is just protocol tunnelling of IPX inside 802.3 packets and that all that has actually been done is to change from an Ethernet packet with a type field of 8137, useful for separating it from TCP/IP, and replaced it with an 802.3 packet by putting in the ISO "length" field the protocol doesn't actually need in order to operate? This all sounds a bit marginal to me, or have I got the wrong end of the stick here? Andrew -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Andrew Hardie ash@omega.uucp | | London, England ukc!cctal!omega!ash | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
donp@na.excelan.com (don provan) (04/18/91)
The News Manager) Nntp-Posting-Host: na Reply-To: donp@novell.com (don provan) Organization: Novell, Inc., San Jose, California References: <280a1ac8@omega.uucp> Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1991 00:18:19 GMT In article <280a1ac8@omega.uucp> ash@omega.UUCP (Andrew Hardie) writes: >...Does this mean that Novell's "OSI Support" is just >protocol tunnelling of IPX inside 802.3 packets... No. Novell has an FTAM product which provides a full seven layer OSI stack for NetWare 3.11. This allows FTAM clients to access the NetWare file system. The IPX inside 802.3 is something Novell's been doing for years. It has never, to my knowledge, been referred to as "OSI Support". don provan donp@novell.com