querubin@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Antonio Querubin) (08/01/90)
This may seem like an oddball question but perhaps other people have run into similar situations: We have a VAX with two ethernet boards running Fusion's Networking System (FNS). After receiving some replies on the net and some calls to FUSION, we think we have it finally setup to route between our campus backbone and our subnet. Unfortunately, FNS doesn't know RIP and so packets can't find their way to our subnet without hard-coding a route into one of the gateways on the backbone (which our network administrators have resisted doing for good reason). We do however have a PC on the subnet running KA9Q which does understand and send RIP packets. Is there some way of having KA9Q do something like a 'proxy RIP' for the VAX so that the campus network knows that the VAX is a gateway for our subnet? Specifics: the campus backbone has a subnet of 128.171.1.0, the VAX's addresses are 128.171.1.99 and 128.171.11.2, our subnet is 128.171.11.0, and the PC has an address of 128.171.11.16. After going through the RIP RFC, it seems that a host is to interpret a RIP message as routes through the originating host to another host or network. Suppose on the PC I have in the autoexec.net file for KA9Q: route add default lan 128.171.11.2 route add [128.171.11.0]/24 lan (where 'lan' is the ethernet port). If I send out RIP broadcasts to 128.171.1.255 from the PC, the VAX should pick it up and route it to the backbone through it's 128.171.1.99 port. But will the backbone hosts interpret that as a route through 128.171.1.99 or as a route through 128.171.11.16? My understanding of the RFC indicates the latter case is correct and therefore probably confuses the gateways since they're expecting to see a subnet of 1 instead of 11 on that segment. Am I correct on this and therefore can't do what I want to do OR is there perhaps some other standard way of doing this? Is it possible for example to have FNS do a proxy ARP for the entire subnet? Seems like the gateways still wouldn't know which ports to send packets out on although individual hosts with only one port might be able to make a a connection. Are there any other possible ways to do this? Antonio Querubin, Jr. querubin@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu querubin@uhccux (BITNET)