Denis.Russell@newcastle.ac.uk (10/19/90)
On 4th Oct I sent out a query about routing extensive IP over an
X.25 network. This is a brief summary of the responses, and
other information gathered at the same time. Many thanks to all
those who responded.
I got several messages in reply. It seems that the main
commercial routers have the right characteristics for the task.
They can support high speed, have settable inactivity timers,
multiple X.25 calls, use X.25 calls for two-way traffic. All
the things we'd hoped for, even expected, but weren't actually
certain about.
It was confirmed that the Sun software established permanent
X.25 calls and never cleared them down, but several people
referred us to the Nottingham software that did not suffer from
these problems.
Several people warned us that large packet and window sizes were
an absolute must for throughput.
Sadly, and despite a couple of specific queries, there were no
responses directly from people relating experience of setting up
an extensive IP network on top of an X.25 network rather than
just operating a few links. However, the second-hand wisdom
(which I do not doubt) was that it was not an ideal way to run
an IP network, but that, subject to tuning, etc, it would work
OK.
Denis.